NRLF 


B   M   37b   E37 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 

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TS 
379 
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YV 


CONTEMPORARY 

AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

1900-1920 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

NEW   YORK   •    BOSTON    •   CHICAGO   •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA   •   SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &   CO.,   LIMITED 

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TORONTO 


CONTEMPORARY 
AMERICAN    NOVELISTS 

1900-1920 


BT 

CARL  VAN  DOREN 


/Beta  got* 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1931 


COPYRIGHT,  1922, 

BY  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 


All  rights  reserved  —  no  part  of  this  book  may  be  reproduced 

in  any   form  without   permission   in   writing 

from  the  publisher. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.     Published  April,  1922. 

Reprinted June,  1922. 

Reprinted August,  1923. 

Reprinted May,  1926. 

Reprinted November,  1927. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America  by 

J.    J.    LITTLE    AND    IVES    COMPANY,    NEW    YORK 


To 
FREDA  KIRCHWEY 


PREFACE 

The  American  Novel,  published  last  year,  undertook 
to  trace  the  progress  of  a  literary  type  in  the  United 
States  from  its  beginnings  to  the  end  of  the  nine- 
teenth century ;  Contemporary  American  Novelists  un- 
dertakes to  study  the  type  as  it  has  existed  during  the 
first  two  decades  of  the  twentieth  century.  Readers 
of  both  volumes  may  note  that  in  this  later  volume 
criticism  has  tended  to  supplant  history.  Only  in 
writing  of  dead  authors  can  the  critic  feel  that  any 
considerable  portion  of  his  task  is  done  when  he  has 
arranged  them  in  what  he  thinks  their  proper  cate- 
gories and  their  true  perspective.  In  the  case  of  living 
authors  he  has  regularly  to  remember  that  he  works 
with  shifting  materials,  with  figures  whose  dimensions 
and  importance  may  be  changed  by  growth,  with  per- 
sons who  may  desert  old  paths  for  new,  reveal  unsus- 
pected attributes,  increase  or  fade  with  the  mere  revo- 
lutions of  time.  All  he  can  expect  to  do  in  dealing 
with  any  current  type  as  fluid  as  the  novel,  is,  seizing 
upon  it  at  some  specific  moment,  to  examine  the  in- 
tentions and  successes  of  outstanding  or  typical  indi- 
viduals and  to  make  the  most  accurate  report  possible 
concerning  them.  Whatever  general  tendency  there 
may  be  ought  to  appear  from  his  examination. 

vii 


viii  PREFACE 

The  general  tendency  appearing  most  clearly  among 
the  novelists  here  studied  is,  of  course,  the  drift  of 
naturalism:  initiated  a  full  generation  ago  by  several 
restless  spirits,  of  whom  E.  W.  Howe  and  Hamlin 
Garland  are  the  most  conspicuous  survivors ;  con- 
tinued by  those  young  geniuses  Stephen  Crane,  Frank 
Norris,  Jack  London,  all  dead  before  their  time,  and 
by  Theodore  Dreiser,  Robert  Herrick,  Upton  Sinclair, 
happily  still  alive;  given  a  fresh  impulse  during  the 
shaken  years  of  the  war  and  of  the  recovery  from  war 
by  such  satirists  as  Edgar  Lee  Masters  and  Sinclair 
Lewis  and  their  companions  in  the  new  revolt.  The 
intelligent  American  fiction  of  the  century  has  to  be 
studied — so  far  as  the  novel  is  concerned — largely  in 
terms  of  its  agreement  or  its  disagreement  with  this 
naturalistic  tendency,  which  has  been  powerful  enough 
to  draw  Winston  Churchill  and  Booth  Tarkington  into 
an  approach  to  its  practices,  to  drive  James  Branch 
Cabell  and  Joseph  Hergesheimer  into  explicit  dissent, 
and  to  throw  into  strong  relief  the  balanced  inde- 
pendence of  Edith  Wharton  and  Willa  Cather.  The 
year  1920,  marking  a  peak  in  the  triumph  of  one  or 
two  species  of  naturalism  and  in  some  ways  closing 
a  chapter,  affords  an  admirable  occasion  to  take  stock. 
This  book,  indeed,  was  planned  and  begun  at  the  close 
of  that  year  and  has  firmly  resisted  the  temptation  to 
do  more  than  glance  at  most  of  the  work  produced  since 
then — even  at  the  price  of  giving  what  must  seem 
insufficient  notice  to  The  Triumph  of  ihe  Egg  and 


PREFACE  ix 

Three  Soldiers  and  of  giving  none  at  all  to  that  still 
more  recent  masterpiece  Cytherea.  While  criticism 
pauses  to  take  stock,  creation  steadily  goes  on. 

Acknowledgments  are  due  The  Nation  for  permission 
to  reprint  from  its  pages  those  portions  of  the  volume 
which  have  already  been  published  there. 

CARL  VAN  DOEEN. 
March,  1922. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I     OLD  STYLE 


1.  Local  Color 1 

2.  Romance         ...»      ,      >.     .      .      .        23 

II     ARGUMENT 

1.  Hamlin  Garland 38 

2.  Winston  Churchill 47 

3.  Robert  Herrick 56 

4.  Upton  Sinclair 65 

5.  Theodore  Dreiser 74 

III     ART 

1.  Booth   Tarkington 84 

2.  Edith  Wharton 95 

3.  James  Branch  Cabell 104 

4.  Willa  Cather 113 

5.  Joseph  Hergesheimer 122 

IV     NEW  STYLE 

1.  Emergent  Types 132 

Ellen     Glasgow,     William    Allen     White, 
Ernest    Poole,    Henry    B.    Fuller,    Mary 
Austin,  Immigrants. 

2.  The  Revolt  from  the  Village   ....      146 
Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Sherwood  Anderson, 

E.  W.  Howe,  Sinclair  Lewis,  Zona  Gale, 
Floyd  Dell,  F.  Scott  Fitzgerald,  Dorothy 
Canfield,  1921. 

xi 


CONTEMPORARY 

AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

1900-1920 


CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN 
NOVELISTS 

CHAPTER  I 
OLD  STYLE 

1.    LOCAL  COLOR 

A  study  of  the  American  novel  of  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury must  first  of  all  take  stock  of  certain  types  of 
fiction  which  continue  to  persist,  with  varying  degrees 
af  vitality  and  significance,  from  the  last  quarter  of 
the  century  preceding. 

There  is,  to  begin  with,  the  type  associated  with  the 
now  moribund  cult  of  local  color,  which  originally  had 
Bret  Harte  for  its  prophet,  and  which,  beginning  almost 
at  once  after  the  Civil  War,  gradually  broadened  out 
until  it  saw  priests  in  every  state  and  followers  in  every 
county.  Obedient  to  the  example  of  the  prophet,  most 
of  the  practitioners  of  the  mode  chose  to  be  episodic 
rather  than  epic  in  their  undertakings;  the  history  of 
local  color  belongs  primarily  to  the  historian  of  the 
short  story.  Even  when  the  local  colorists  essayed  the 
novel  they  commonly  did  little  more  than  to  expand 

I 


2     CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

some  episode  into  elaborate  dimensions  or  to  string 
beads  of  episode  upon  an  obvious  thread.  Hardly  one 
of  them  ever  made  any  real  advance,  either  in  art  or 
reputation,  upon  his  earliest  important  volume :  George 
Washington  Cable,  after  more  than  forty  years,  is  still 
on  the  whole  best  represented  by  his  Old  Creole  Days; 
and  so — to  name  only  the  chief  among  the  survivors — 
after  intervals  not  greatly  shorter  are  Mary  N.  Mur- 
free  ("Charles  Egbert  Craddock")  by  In  the  Tennessee 
Mountains,  Thomas  Nelson  Page  by  In  Ole  Virginia, 
Mary  E.  Wilkins  Freeman  by  A  Humble  Romance  and 
Other  Stories,  James  Lane  Allen  by  Flute  and  Violin, 
and  Alice  Brown  by  Meadow-Grass. 

The  eager  popular  demand  for  these  brevities  does 
not  entirely  account  for  the  failure  of  the  type  to  go 
beyond  its  first  experimental  stage.  The  defects  of 
local  color  inhere  in  the  constitution  of  the  cult  itself, 
which,  as  its  name  suggests,  thought  first  of  color  and 
then  of  form,  first  of  the  piquant  surfaces  and  then — 
if  at  all — of  the  stubborn  deeps  of  human  life.  In  a 
sense,  the  local  colorists  were  all  pioneers:  they  ex- 
plored the  older  communities  as  solicitously  as  they 
did  the  new,  but  they  most  of  them  came  earliest  in  some 
field  or  other  and  found — or  thought — it  necessary  to 
clear  the  top  of  the  soil  before  they  sank  shaft  or  spade 
into  it.  Moreover,  they  accepted  almost  without 
challenge  the  current  inhibitions  of  gentility,  reticence, 
cheerfulness.  They  confined  themselves  to  the  emotions 
and  the  ideas  and  the  language,  for  the  most  part,  of 
the  respectable;  they  disregarded  the  stormier  or 


OLD  STYLE  3 

stealthier  behavior  of  mankind  or  veiled  it  with  discreet 
periphrasis;  they  sweetened  their  narratives  wherever 
possible  with  a  brimming  optimism  nicely  tinctured 
with  amiable  sentiments.  Poetic  justice  prospered  and 
happy  endings  were  orthodox.  To  a  remarkable  ex- 
tent the  local  colorists  passed  by  the  immediate  prob- 
lems of  Americans — social,  theological,  political,  eco- 
nomic ;  nor  did  they  frequently  rise  above  the  local  to 
the  universal.  They  were,  in  short,  ordinarily  pro- 
vincial, without,  however,  the  rude  durability  or  the 
homely  truthfulness  of  provincialism  at  its  best. 

To  reflect  upon  the  achievements  of  this  dwindling 
cult  is  to  discover  that  it  invented  few  memorable  plots, 
devised  almost  no  new  styles,  created  little  that  was 
genuinely  original  in  its  modes  of  truth  or  beauty, 
and  even  added  but  the  scantiest  handful  of  characters 
to  the  great  gallery  of  the  imagination.  What  local 
color  did  was  to  fit  obliging  fiction  to  resisting  fact 
in  so  many  native  regions  that  the  entire  country  came 
in  some  degree  to  see  itself  through  literary  eyes  and 
therefore  in  some  degree  to  feel  civilized  by  the  sight. 
This  is,  indeed,  one  of  the  important  processes  of  civili- 
zation. But  in  this  case  it  was  limited  in  its  influence 
by  the  habits  of  vision  which  the  local  colorists  had. 
They  scrutinized  their  world  at  the  instigation  of 
benevolence  rather  than  at  that  of  intelligence ;  they 
felt  it  with  friendship  rather  than  with  passion.  And 
because  of  their  limitations  of  intelligence  and  passion 
they  fell  naturally  into  routine  ways  and  both  saw 
and  represented  in  accordance  with  this  or  that  pre- 


4     CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

vailing  formula.  Herein  they  were  powerfully  con- 
firmed by  the  pressure  of  editors  and  a  public  who 
wanted  each  writer  to  continue  in  the  channel  of  his 
happiest  success  and  not  to  disappoint  them  by  new 
departures.  Not  only  did  this  result  in  confining  indi- 
viduals to  a  single  channel  each  but  it  resulted  in  the 
convergence  of  all  of  them  into  a  few  broad  and  shallow 
streams.. 

An  excellent  example  may  be  found  in  the  flourishing 
cycle  of  stories  which,  while  Bret  Harte  was  celebrat- 
ing California,  grew  up  about  the  life  of  Southern 
plantations  before  the  war.  The  mood  of  most  of  these 
was  of  course  elegiac  and  the  motive  was  to  show 
how  much  splendor  had  perished  in  the  downfall  of  the 
old  regime.  Over  and  over  they  repeated  the  same 
themes:  how  an  irascible  planter  refuses  to  allow  his 
daughter  to  marry  the  youth  of  her  choice  and  how 
true  love  finds  a  way ;  how  a  beguiling  Southern  maiden 
has  to  choose  between  lovers  and  gives  her  hand  and 
heart  to  him  who  is  stoutest  in  his  adherence  to  the 
Confederacy;  how,  now  and  then,  love  crosses  the 
lines  and  a  Confederate  girl  magnanimously,  though 
only  after  a  desperate  struggle  with  herself,  marries 
a  Union  officer  who  has  saved  the  old  plantation  from 
a  marauding  band  of  Union  soldiers;  how  a  pair  of 
ancient  slaves  cling  to  their  duty  during  the  appalling 
years  and  will  not  presume  upon  their  freedom  even 
when  it  comes;  how  the  gentry,  though  menaced  by  a 
riffraff  of  poor  whites,  nevertheless  hold  their  heads 
high  and  shine  brightly  through  the  gloom;  how  some 


OLD  STYLE  5 

former  planter  and  everlasting  colonel  declines  to  be 
reconstructed  by  events  and  passes  the  remainder  of 
his  years  as  a  courageous,  bibulous,  orgulous  simula- 
crum of  his  once  thriving  self.  Mr.  Page's  In  Ole  Vir- 
ginia and  F.  Hopkinson  Smith's  Colonel  Carter  of  Car- 
tersville  in  a  brief  compass  employ  all  these  themes ;  and 
dozens  of  books  which  might  be  named  play  variations 
upon  them  without  really  enlarging  or  correcting  them. 
All  of  them  were  kindly,  humorous,  sentimental,  charm- 
ing; almost  all  of  them  are  steadily  fading  out  like 
family  photographs. 

The  South,  however,  did  not  restrict  itself  wholly  to 
its  plantation  cycle.  In  New  Orleans  Mr.  Cable  daintily 
worked  the  lode  which  had  been  deposited  there  by  a 
French  and  Spanish  past  and  by  the  presence  still  of 
Creole  elements  in  the  population.  Yet  he  too  was 
elegiac,  sentimental,  pretty,  even  when  his  style  was 
most  deft  and  his  representations  most  engaging. 
Quaintness  was  his  second  nature;  romance  was  in 
his  blood.  Bras-Coupe,  the  great,  proud,  rebellious 
slave  in  The  Grandissimes,  belongs  to  the  ancient 
lineage  of  those  African  princes  who  in  many  tales 
have  been  sold  to  chain  and  lash  and  have  escaped  from 
them  by  dying.  The  postures  and  graces  and  con- 
trivances of  Mr.  Cable's  Creoles  are  traditional  to  all 
the  little  aristocracies  surviving,  in  fiction,  from  some 
more  substantial  day.  Yet  in  spite  of  these  conven- 
tions his  better  novels  have  a  texture  of  genuine  vivid- 
ness and  beauty.  In  their  portrayal  of  the  manners  of 
New  Orleans  they  have  many  points  of  guiet  satire  and 


6      CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

censure  that  betray  a  critical  intelligence  working 
seriously  behind  them.  That  critical  disposition  in 
Mr.  Cable  led  him  to  disagree  with  the  majority  of 
Southerners  regarding  the  justice  due  the  Negroes ;  and 
it  helped  persuade  him  to  spend  the  remainder  of  his 
life  in  a  distant  region. 

The  incident  is  symptomatic.  While  slavery  still 
existed,  public  opinion  in  the  South  had  demanded  that 
literature  should  exhibit  the  institution  only  under  a 
rosy  light ;  public  opinion  now  demanded  that  the  prob- 
lem in  its  new  guise  should  still  be  glossed  over  in  the 
old  way.  In  neither  era,  consequently,  could  an  honest 
novelist  freely  follow  his  observations  upon  Southern 
life  in  general.  The  mind  of  the  herd  bore  down  upon 
him  and  crushed  him  into  the  accepted  molds.  It 
seems  a  curious  irony  that  the  Negroes  who  thus 
innocently  limited  the  literature  of  their  section  should 
have  been  the  subjects  of  a  little  body  of  narrative 
which  bids  fair  to  outlast  all  that  local  color  hit  upon 
in  the  South.  Joel  Chandler  Harris  is  not,  strictly 
speaking,  a  contemporary,  but  Uncle  Remus  is  contem- 
porary and  perennial.  His  stories  are  grounded  in 
the  universal  traits  of  simple  souls;  they  are  also  the 
whimsical,  incidental  mirror  of  a  particular  race  during 
a  significant — though  now  extinct — phase  of  its  career. 
They  are  at  once  as  ancient  and  as  fresh  as  folk-lore. 

Besides  the  rich  planters  and  their  slaves  one  other 
class  of  human  beings  in  the  South  especially  attracted 
the  attention  of  the  local  colorists — the  mountaineers. 
Certain  distant  cousins  of  this  backwoods  stock  had 


OLD  STYLE  7 

come  into  literature  as  "Pikes"  or  poor  whites  in  the 
Far  West  with  Bret  Harte  and  in  the  Middle  West  with 
John  Hay  and  Edward  Eggleston;  it  remained  for 
Charles  Egbert  Craddock  in  Tennessee  and  John  Fox  in 
Kentucky  to  discover  the  heroic  and  sentimental  quali- 
ties of  the  breed  among  its  highland  fastnesses  of  the 
Great  Smoky  and  Cumberland  Mountains.  Here 
again  formulas  sprang  up  and  so  stifled  the  free  growth 
of  observation  that,  though  a  multitude  of  stories  has 
been  written  about  the  mountains,  almost  all  of  them 
may  be  resolved  into  themes  as  few  in  number  as  those 
which  succeeded  nearer  Tidewater:  how  a  stranger 
man  comes  into  the  mountains,  loves  the  flower  of  all 
the  native  maidens,  and  clashes  with  the  suspicions  or 
jealousies  of  her  neighborhood;  how  two  clans  have 
been  worn  away  by  a  long  vendetta  until  only  one  rep- 
resentative of  each  clan  remains  and  the  two  forgive 
and  forget  among  the  ruins ;  how  a  band  of  highlanders 
defend  themselves  against  the  invading  minions  of 
a  law  made  for  the  nation  at  large  but  hardly  appli- 
cable to  highland  circumstances;  how  the  mountain 
virtues  in  some  way  or  other  prove  superior  to  the 
softer  virtues — almost  vices  by  comparison — of  the 
world  of  plains  and  cities.  These  formulas,  however, 
resulted  from  another  cause  than  the  popular  compla- 
cency which  hated  to  be  disturbed  in  Virginia  and 
Louisiana.  The  mountain  people,  inarticulate  them- 
selves, have  uniformly  been  seen  from  the  outside  and 
therefore  have  been  studied  in  their  surface  peculiarities 
more  often  than  in  their  deeper  traits  of  character. 


8     CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

And,  having  once  entered  the  realm  of  legend,  they 
continue  to  be  known  by  the  half-dozen  distinguishing 
features  which  in  legend  are  always  enough  for  any 
type. 

In  the  North  and  West,  of  course,  much  the  same 
process  went  on  as  in  the  South  among  the  local  color- 
ists,  conditioned  by  the  same  demands  and  pressures. 
Because  the  territory  was  wider,  however,  in  the  ex- 
panding sections,  the  types  of  character  there  were 
somewhat  less  likely  to  be  confined  to  one  locality  than 
in  the  section  which  for  a  time  had  a  ring  drawn  round 
it  by  its  past  and  by  the  difficulty  of  emerging  from  it ; 
and  because  the  career  of  North  and  West  was  not 
definitely  interrupted  by  the  war,  the  types  of  fiction 
there  have  persisted  longer  than  in  the  South,  where 
a  new  order  of  life,  after  a  generation  of  clinging 
memories,  has  moved  toward  popular  heroes  of  a  new 
variety. 

The  cowboy,  for  instance,  legitimate  successor  to  the 
miners  and  gamblers  of  Bret  Harte,  might  derive  from 
almost  any  one  of  the  states  and  might  range  over 
prodigious  areas ;  it  is  partly  accident,  of  course,  that 
he  stands  out  so  sharply  among  the  numerous  conditions 
of  men  produced  by  the  new  frontier.  Except  on  very 
few  occasions,  as  in  Alfred  Henry  Lewis's  racy  Wolf- 
ville  stories  and  in  Frederick  Remington's  vivid  pic- 
tures, in  Andy  Adams's  more  minute  chronicle  The 
Log  of  a  Cowboy,  in  Owen  Wister's  more  sentimental 
The  Virginian,  and  in  O.  Henry's  more  diversified 
Heart  of  the  West  and  its  fellows  among  his  books,  the 


OLD  STYLE  9 

cowboy  has  regularly  moved  on  the  plane  of  the  sub- 
literary — in  dime  novels  and,  latterly,  in  moving  pic- 
tures. He,  like  the  mountaineer  of  the  South,  has  him- 
self been  largely  inarticulate  except  for  his  rude  songs 
and  ballads;  formula  and  tradition  caught  him  early 
and  in  fiction  stiffened  one  of  the  most  picturesque 
of  human  beings — a  modern  Centaur,  an  American 
Cossack,  a  Western  picaro — into  a  stock  figure  who  in 
a  stock  costume  perpetually  sits  a  bucking  broncho, 
brandishes  a  six-shooter  or  swings  a  lariat,  rounds  up 
stampeding  cattle,  makes  fierce  war  on  Mexicans,  In- 
dians, and  rival  outfits,  and  ardently,  humbly  woos 
the  ranchman's  gentle  daughter  or  the  timorous  school- 
ma'am.  He  still  has  no  Homer,  no  Gogol,  no  Feni- 
more  Cooper  even,  though  he  invites  a  master  of  some 
sort  to  take  advantage  of  a  thrilling  opportunity. 

The  same  fate  of  formula  and  tradition  befell  an- 
other type  multiplied  by  the  local  novelists — the  bad 
boy.  His  career  may  be  said  to  have  begun  in  New 
England,  with  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich's  reaction  from 
the  priggish  manikins  who  infested  the  older  "juven- 
iles"; but  Mark  Twain  took  him  up  with  such  mastery 
that  his  subsequent  habitat  has  usually  been  the  Middle 
West,  where  a  recognized  lineage  connects  Tom  Sawyer 
and  Huckleberry  Finn  with  Mitch  Miller  and  Penrod 
Schofield  and  their  fellow-conspirators  against  the 
peace  of  villages.  The  bad  boy,  it  must  be  noticed,  is 
never  really  bad ;  he  is  simply  mischievous.  He  serves 
as  a  natural  outlet  for  the  imagination  of  communities 
which  are  respectable  but  which  lack  reverence  for 


10    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

solemn  dignity.  He  can  play  the  wildest  pranks  and 
still  be  innocent;  he  can  have  his  adolescent  fling  and 
then  settle  down  into  a  prudent  maturity.  Both  the 
influence  of  Mark  Twain  and  the  local  color  tendency 
toward  uniformity  in  type  have  held  the  bad  boy  to 
a  path  which,  in  view  of  his  character,  seems  singularly 
narrow.  In  book  after  book  he  indulges  in  the  same 
practical  jokes  upon  parents,  teachers,  and  all  those 
in  authority;  brags,  fibs,  fights,  plays  truant,  learns 
to  swear  and  smoke,  with  the  same  devices  and  conse- 
quences; suffers  from  the  same  agonies  of  shyness,  the 
same  indifference  to  the  female  sex,  the  same  awkward 
inclination  toward  particular  little  girls.  For  the  most 
part,  thanks  to  the  formulas,  he  has  been  examined 
from  the  angle  of  adult  irritation  or  amusement ;  only 
very  recently — as  by  Edgar  Lee  Masters  and  Sherwood 
Anderson — has  he  been  credited  with  a  life  and  passions 
more  or  less  his  own  and  therefore  as  fully  rounded  as 
his  stage  of  development  permits. 

The  American  business  man,  with  millions  of  imag- 
inations daily  turned  upon  him,  rarely  appears  in  that 
fiction  which  sprang  from  local  color  except  as  the 
canny  trader  of  some  small  town  or  as  the  ruthless 
magnate  of  some  glittering  metropolis.  David  Harwm 
remains  his  rural  avatar  and  The  Letters  from  a  Self- 
Made  Merchant  to  His  Son  his  most  popular  commen- 
tary. Doubtless  the  existence  of  this  type  in  every 
community  tends  to  warn  off  the  searchers  after  local 
figures,  who  have  preferred,  in  their  fashion,  to  be 
monopolists  when  they  could.  Doubtless,  also,  the 


OLD  STYLE  11 

American  business  man  has  suffered  from  the  critical 
light  in  which  he  has  been  studied  by  the  reflective 
novelists.  But  though  the  higher  grades  of  literature 
have  refused  to  pay  unstinted  tribute  and  honor  to  men 
of  wealth,  the  lower  grades  have  paid  almost  as  lavishly 
as  life  itself. 

Multitudes  of  poor  boys  in  popular  fiction  rise  to 
affluence  by  the  practice  of  the  commercial  virtues. 
To  be  self-made,  the  axiom  tacitly  runs,  is  to  be  well- 
made.  Time  was  in  the  United  States  when  the  true 
hero  had  to  start  his  career,  unaided,  from  some  lonely 
farm,  from  some  widow's  cottage,  or  from  some  city 
slum;  and  although,  with  the  growth  of  luxury  in  the 
nation,  readers  have  come  to  approve  the  heir  who 
puts  on  overalls  and  works  up  in  a  few  months  from  the 
bottom  of  the  factory  to  the  top,  the  standards  of  suc- 
cess are  practically  the  same  in  all  instances :  sleepless 
industry,  restless  scheming,  resistless  will,  coupled  with 
a  changeless  probity  in  the  domestic  excellences.  Noth- 
ing is  more  curious  about  the  American  business  man 
of  fiction  than  the  sentimentality  he  displays  in  all 
matters  of  the  heart.  He  may  hold  as  robustly  as  he 
likes  to  the  doctrine  that  business  is  business  and  that 
business  and  sympathy  will  not  mix,  but  when  put  to 
the  test  he  must  always  soften  under  the  pleadings  of 
distress  and  be  malleable  to  the  desires  of  mother, 
sweetheart,  wife,  or  daughter.  Even  when  a  popular 
novelist  sets  out  to  be  reflective — say,  for  example, 
Winston  Churchill — he  takes  his  hero  up  to  the  moun- 
tain of  success  and  then  conducts  him  down  again  to 


12    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

the  valley  of  humiliation,  made  conscious  that  the  love, 
after  all,  either  of  his  family  or  of  his  society,  is  better 
than  lucre.  Theodore  Dreiser's  stubborn  habit  of  pre- 
senting his  rich  men's  will  to  power  without  abatement 
or  apology  has  helped  to  keep  him  steadily  suspected. 
The  popular  romancers  have  contrived  to  mingle  pas- 
sion for  money  and  susceptibility  to  moralism  somewhat 
upon  the  analogy  of  those  lucky  thaumaturgists  who 
are  able  to  eat  their  cake  and  have  it  too. 

A  similar  mixture  occurs  in  the  politician  of  popular 
tradition.  He  hardly  ever  rises  to  the  dimensions  of 
statesmanship,  and  indeed  rarely  belongs  to  the  Federal 
government  at  all:  Washington  has  always  been  singu- 
larly neglected  by  the  novelists.  The  American  poli- 
tician of  fiction  is  essentially  a  local  personage,  the  boss 
of  ward  or  village.  Customarily  he  holds  no  office  him- 
self but  instead  sits  in  some  dusty  den  and  dispenses 
injustice  with  an  even  hand.  Candidates  fear  his  in- 
fluence and  either  truckle  to  him  or  advance  against 
him  with  the  weapons  of  reform — failing,  as  a  rule,  to 
accomplish  anything.  Aldermen  and  legislators  are  his 
creatures.  His  web  is  out  in  all  directions:  he  holds 
this  man's  mortgage,  knows  that  man's  guilty  secret, 
discovers  the  other's  weakness  and  takes  advantage  of 
it.  He  is  cynically  illiterate  and  contemptuous  of  the 
respectable  classes.  If  need  be  he  can  resort  to  out- 
rageous violence  to  gain  his  ends.  And  yet,  though 
the  reflective  novelists  have  all  condemned  him  for  half 
a  century,  he  sits  fast  in  ordinary  fiction,  where  he  is 
tolerated  with  the  amused  fatalism  which  in  actual 


OLD  STYLE  13 

American  life  has  allowed  his  lease  to  run  so  long. 
What  justifies  him  is  his  success — his  countrymen  love 
success  for  its  own  sake — and  his  kind  heart.  Like 
Robin  Hood  he  levies  upon  the  plethoric  rich  for  the 
deserving  poor ;  and  he  yields  to  the  tender  entreaties  of 
the  widow  and  the  orphan  with  amiable  gestures. 

The  women  characters  evolved  by  the  school  of  local 
color  endure  a  serious  restriction  from  the  excessive 
interest  taken  by  the  novelists  in  the  American  young 
girl.  Not  only  has  she  as  a  possible  reader  established 
the  boundaries  beyond  which  they  might  not  go  in 
speaking  of  sexual  affairs  but  she  has  dominated  the 
scene  of  their  inventions  with  her  glittering  energy 
and  her  healthy  bloodlessness.  Some  differences  appear 
among  the  sections  of  the  country  as  to  what  special 
phases  of  her  character  shall  be  here  or  there  preferred  : 
she  is  ordinarily  most  capricious  in  the  Southern, 
most  strenuous  in  the  Western,  most  knowing  in  the 
New  York,  and  most  demure  in  the  New  England 
novels.  Yet  everywhere  she  considerably  resembles  a 
bright,  cool,  graceful  boy  pretending  to  be  a  woman. 
Coeducation  and  the  scarcity  of  chaperons  have  made 
her  self-possessed  to  a  degree  which  mystifies  readers 
not  duly  versed  in  American  folkways.  Though  she 
plays  at  love-making  almost  from  the  cradle,  she  man- 
ages hardly  ever  to  be  scorched — a  salamander,  as  one 
novelist  suggests,  sporting  among  the  flames  of  life. 

When  native  Victorianism  was  at  its  height,  in  the 
third  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  she  inclined  to 
piety  as  her  mode  of  preservation;  at  the  present  mo- 


U  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

ment  she  inclines  to  a  romping  optimism  which  frightens 
away  both  thought  and  passion.  From  The  Wide,  Wide 
World  to  Pollyanna,  however,  she  has  taken  habitual 
advantage  of  the  reverence  for  the  virgin  which  is  one 
of  the  most  pervasive  elements  in  American  popular 
opinion.  That  reverence  has  many  charming  and  whole- 
some aspects ;  it  has  given  young  women  a  priceless  free- 
dom of  movement  in  America  without  the  penalty  of 
being  constantly  suspected  of  sexual  designs  which  they 
may  not  harbor.  It  must  be  remembered  that  the  Daisy 
Millers  who  awaken  unjust  European  gossip  are  under- 
stood at  home,  and  that  the  understanding  given  them 
is  a  form  of  homage  certainly  no  less  honorable  than 
the  compliments  of  gallantry.  In  actual  experience, 
however,  girls  grow  up,  whereas  the  popular  fiction  of 
the  United  States  has  done  its  best  to  keep  them  forever 
children.  Nothing  breaks  the  crystal  shallows  of  their 
confidence.  They  are  insolently  secure  in  a  world  ap- 
parently made  for  them.  The  little  difficulties  which 
perturb  their  courtship  are  nine-tenths  of  them  super- 
ficial and  external  matters,  and  the  end  comes  as 
smoothly  as  a  fairy  tale's,  before  doubt  has  ever  had 
an  opportunity  to  shatter  or  passion  the  occasion  to 
purge  a  spirit.  From  Hawthorne  to  the  beginnings  of 
naturalism  there  was  hardly  a  single  profound  love 
story  written  in  America.  How  could  there  be  when 
green  girls  were  the  sole  heroines  and  censors? 

Among  the  older  women  created  by  the  local  color 
generation  there  were  certain  fashionable  successes  and 
social  climbers  in  the  large  cities  who  have  more  com- 


OLD  STYLE  15 

plex  fortunes  than  the  young  girls;  but  for  the  most 
part  they  are  merely  typical  or  conventional — as  selfish 
as  gold  and  as  hard  as  agate.  On  somewhat  humbler 
levels  that  generation — as  Mary  Austin  has  pointed 
out  of  American  fiction  at  large — came  nearer  to  reality 
by  its  representation  of  a  type  peculiar  to  the  United 
States :  the  "woman"  who  is  also  a  "lady" ;  that  is,  who 
combines  in  herself  the  functions  both  of  the  busy 
housewife  and  of  the  charming  ornament  of  her  society. 
The  gradual  reduction  in  America  of  the  servant  class 
has  served  to  develop  women  who  keep  books  and  music 
beside  them  at  their  domestic  tasks  as  pioneer  farmers 
kept  muskets  near  them  in  the  fields.  They  devote  to 
homely  duties  the  time  devoted  by  European  ladies  to 
love,  intrigue,  public  affairs;  they  preserve,  thanks  to 
countless  labor-saving  devices,  for  more  or  less  intel- 
lectual pursuits  the  strength  which  among  European 
women  is  consumed  by  habitual  drudgery.  The  combi- 
nation of  functions  has  probably  done  much  to  increase 
sexlessness  and  to  decrease  helplessness,  and  so  to  pro- 
duce almost  a  new  species  of  womanhood  which  is  bound 
eventually  to  be  of  great  moment  in  the  national  life. 
Local  color,  however,  taking  the  species  for  granted, 
seems  hardly  to  have  been  aware  of  its  significant 
existence. 

Only  New  England  emphasized  a  distinct  type:  the 
old  maid.  She  has  been  studied  in  that  section  as  in  no 
other  quarter  of  the  world.  Expansion  and  emigration 
after  the  Civil  War  drew  very  heavily  upon  the  de- 
clining Puritan  stock;  and  naturally  the  young  men 


16    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

left  their  native  farms  and  villages  more  numerously 
than  the  young  women,  who  remained  behind  and  in 
many  cases  never  married.  Local  fiction  fell  very 
largely  into  the  hands  of  women — Harriet  Beecher 
Stowe,  Rose  Terry  Cooke,  Sarah  Orne  Jewett,  Mary  E. 
Wilkins  Freeman,  Alice  Brown — who  broke  completely 
with  the  age-old  tradition  of  ridiculing  spinsters  no 
longer  young.  In  the  little  cycles  which  these  story- 
tellers elaborated  the  old  maid  is  likely  to  be  the  center 
of  her  episode,  studied  in  her  own  career  and  not  merely 
in  that  of  households  upon  which  she  is  some  sort  of 
parasite.  The  heroine  of  Mrs.  Freeman's  A  New  Eng- 
land Nun  is  an  illuminating  instance:  she  has  been  be- 
trothed to  an  absent,  fortune-hunting  lover  for  fourteen 
years,  and  now  that  he  is  back  she  finds  herself  full 
of  consternation  at  his  masculine  habits  and  rejoices 
when  he  turns  to  another  woman  and  leaves  his  first 
love  to  the  felicity  of  her  contented  cell. 

What  in  most  literatures  appears  as  a  catastrophe 
appears  in  New  England  as  a  relief.  Energy  has  run 
low  in  the  calm  veins  of  such  women,  and  they  have 
better  things  to  do  than  to  dwell  upon  the  lives  they 
might  have  led  had  marriage  complicated  them.  Here 
genre  painting  reaches  its  apogee  in  American  litera- 
ture: quaint  interiors  scrupulously  described;  rounds 
of  minute  activity  familiarly  portrayed ;  skimpy  moods 
analyzed  with  a  delicate  competence  of  touch.  At  the 
same  time,  New  England  literature  was  now  too  senti- 
mental and  now  too  realistic  to  allow  all  its  old  maids 
to  remain  perpetually  sweet  and  passive.  la  its  senti- 


OLD  STYLE  17 

mental  hours  it  liked  to  call  up  their  younger  days  and 
to  show  them  at  the  point  which  had  decided  or  com- 
pelled their  future  loneliness — again  and  again  dis- 
covering some  act  of  abnegation  such  as  giving  up  a 
lover  because  of  the  unsteadiness  of  his  moral  princi- 
ples or  surrendering  him  to  another  woman  to  whom 
he  seemed  for  some  reason  or  other  to  belong.  In  its 
realistic  hours  local  color  in  New  England  liked  to 
examine  the  atrophy  of  the  emotions  which  in  these 
stories  often  grows  upon  the  celibate.  One  formula 
endlessly  repeated  deals  with  the  efforts  of  some  acrid 
spinster — or  wife  long  widowed — to  keep  a  young  girl 
from  marriage,  generally  out  of  contempt  for  love  as 
a  trivial  weakness;  the  conclusion  usually  makes  love 
victorious  after  a  thunderbolt  of  revelation  to  the 
hinderer.  There  are  inquiries,  too,  into  the  repressions 
and  obsessions  of  women  whose  lives  in  this  fashion  or 
that  have  missed  their  flowering.  Many  of  the  in- 
quiries are  sympathetic,  tender,  penetrating,  but  most 
of  them  incline  toward  timidity  and  tameness.  Their 
note  is  prevailingly  the  note  of  elegy;  they  are  seen 
through  a  trembling  haze  of  reticence.  It  is  as  if 
they  had  been  made  for  readers  of  a  vitality  no  more 
abundant  than  that  of  their  angular  heroines. 

It  would  be  possible  to  make  a  picturesque,  precious 
anthology  of  stories  dealing  with  the  types  and 
humors  of  New  England.  Different  writers  would 
contribute  different  tones :  Sarah  Orne  Jewett  the  tone 
of  faded  gentility  brooding  over  its  miniature  posses- 
lions  in  decaying  seaport  towns  or  in  idyllic  villages  ^ 


18  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

little  further  inland;  Mary  E.  Wilkins  Freeman  the 
tone  of  a  stern  honesty  trained  in  isolated  farms  and 
along  high,  exposed  ridges  where  the  wind  seems  to 
have  gnarled  the  dispositions  of  men  and  women  as  it 
has  gnarled  the  apple  trees  and  where  human  stubborn- 
ness perpetually  crops  out  through  a  covering  of 
kindliness  as  if  in  imitation  of  those  granite  ledges 
which  everywhere  tend  to  break  through  the  thin  soil; 
Alice  Brown  the  tone  of  a  homely  accuracy  touched 
with  the  fresh  hues  of  a  gently  poetical  temperament. 
More  detailed  in  actuality  than  the  stories  of  other 
sections,  these  New  England  plots  do  not  fall  so  read- 
ily into  formulas  as  do  those  of  the  South  and  West ; 
and  yet  they  have  their  formulas:  how  a  stubborn 
pride  worthy  of  some  supreme  cause  holds  an  elderly 
Yankee  to  a  petty,  obstinate  course  until  grievous 
calamities  ensue ;  how  a  rural  wife,  neglected  and  over- 
worked by  her  husband,  rises  in  revolt  against  the 
treadmill  of  her  dull  tasks  and  startles  him  into  com- 
prehension and  awkward  consideration;  how  the  rem- 
nant of  some  once  prosperous  family  puts  into  the 
labor  of  keeping  up  appearances  an  amount  of  effort 
which,  otherwise  expended,  might  restore  the  family 
fortunes ;  how  neighbors  lock  horns  in  the  ruthless  liti' 
gation  which  in  New  England  corresponds  to  the  ven- 
dettas of  Kentucky  and  how  they  are  reconciled  even- 
tually by  sentiment  in  one  guise  or  another;  how  a 
young  girl — there  are  no  Tom  Joneses  and  few  Ham- 
lets in  this  womanly  universe — grows  up  bright  and 
sensitive  as  a  flower  and  suffers  from  the  hard,  stiff 


OLD  STYLE  19 

frame  of  pious  poverty ;  how  a  superb  heroism  springs 
out  of  a  narrow  life,  expressing  itself  in  some  act  of 
pitiful  surrender  and  veiling  the  deed  under  an  even 
more  pitiful  inarticulateness. 

The  cities  of  New  England  have  been  almost  passed 
over  by  the  local  colorists ;  Boston,  the  capital  of  the 
Puritans,  has  singularly  to  depend  upon  the  older 
Holmes  or  the  visiting  Howells  of  Ohio  for  its  reputa- 
tion in  fiction.  Ever  since  Hawthorne,  the  romancers 
and  novelists  of  his  native  province  have  taken,  one  may 
say,  to  the  fields,  where  they  have  worked  much  in  the 
mood  of  Rose  Terry  Cooke,  who  called  her  best  col- 
lection of  stories  Huckleberries  to  emphasize  what  she 
thought  a  true  resemblance  between  the  crops  and 
characters  of  New  England — "hardy,  sweet  yet  spicy, 
defying  storms  of  heat  or  cold  with  calm  persistence, 
clinging  to  a  poor  soil,  barren  pastures,  gray  and 
rocky  hillsides,  yet  drawing  fruitful  issues  from  scanty 
sources." 

Alas  that  as  time  goes  on  the  issues  of  such  art  seem 
less  fruitful  than  once  they  seemed;  that  even  Mrs. 
Freeman's  Pembroke,  one  of  the  best  novels  of  its  class, 
lacks  form  and  structure,  and  seems  to  encroach  upon 
caricature  in  its  study  of  the  progress  and  conse- 
quences of  Yankee  pride.  After  a  fecund  generation 
of  such  stories  Edith  Wharton  in  Ethan  Frorne  has 
surpassed  all  her  native  rivals  in  tragic  power  and 
distinction  of  language;  Robert  Frost  has  been  able 
to  distil  the  essence  of  all  of  them  in  three  slender 
books  of  verse;  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson  in  a  few 


20  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

brief  poems  has  created  the  wistful  Tilbury  Town  and 
has  endowed  it  with  pathos  at  once  more  haunting  and 
more  lasting  than  that  of  any  New  England  village 
chronicled  in  prose;  it  has  remained  for  the  Pennsyl- 
vanian  Joseph  Hergesheimer  in  Java  Head  to  seize 
most  artfully  upon  the  riches  of  loveliness  that  survive 
from  the  hour  when  Massachusetts  was  at  its  noon  of 
prosperity;  and  local  color  of  the  orthodox  tradition 
now  persists  in  New  England  hardly  anywhere  except 
around  Cape  Cod,  of  which  Josepb  C-  Lincoln  is  the 
dry,  quaint,  amusing  laureate. 

Through  the  influence,  in  important  measure,  of 
Howells  and  the  Atlantic  Monthly  the  modes  of  fiction 
which  were  practised  east  of  Albany  extended  their 
example  to  other  districts  also :  to  northern  New  York 
in  Irving  Bacheller;  to  Ohio  in  Mary  S.  Watts  and 
Brand  Whitlock;  to  Indiana  in  Meredith  Nicholson; 
to  Wisconsin  in  Zona  Gale;  to  Iowa  and  Arkansas  in 
Alice  French  ("Octave  Thanet")  ;  to  Kansas  in  Wil- 
liam Allen  White ;  to  the  Colorado  mines  in  Mary  Hal- 
lock  Foote;  to  the  Virginias  in  Ellen  Glasgow  and 
Henry  Sydnor  Harrison;  to  Georgia  in  Will  N.  Har- 
ben;  and  to  other  neighborhoods  in  other  neighborly 
chroniclers  whose  mere  names  could  stretch  out  to  a 
point  beyond  which  critical  emphasis  would  be  lost. 
New  York  City  clung  to  less  tender  and  more  incisive 
habits  of  fiction;  that  city's  pace  for  local  color  was 
set  by  the  deft,  bright  Richard  Harding  Davis,  Henry 
Cuyler  Bunner,  Brander  Matthews,  O.  Henry — all  well 
fcnown  figures;  by  the  late  Herman  Knickerbocker 


OLD  STYLE  21 

Viele,  too  little  known,  in  whose  novels,  such  as  The 
Last  of  the  Knickerbockers,  affectionate  accuracy  is 
mated  with  smiling,  graceful  humor;  and  by  David 
Gray,  too  little  known,  whose  Gallops,  concerned  with 
the  horsy  parish  of  St.  Thomas  Equinus  near  New 
York  City,  contains  the  most  amusing  stories  about 
fashionable  sports  which  this  republic  has  brought 
forth.  In  the  Middle  West  Edgar  Watson  Howe  and 
Hamlin  Garland,  and  in  the  Far  West  Frank  Norris 
and  Jack  London,  broke  with  the  customary  tendency 
J>y  turning  away  from  pathos  toward  tragedy,  and 
away  from  discreet  benevolence  toward  emphatic  can- 
dor.  The  prevailing  school  of  naturalism  has  made 
its  principal  advance  upon  the  passing  school  of  local 
color  by  a  sacrifice  of  genial  neighborliness ;  no  less 
exact  and  detailed  in  observation  than  their  prede- 
cessors, the  naturalists  have  insisted  upon  bringing 
criticism  in  and  measuring  the  most  amiable  locality 
by  wider  standards.  Here  lies  the  essential  point  of 
difference  between  the  old  style  and  the  new. 

It  is  by  reference  to  this  point  that  the  credit — 
such  as  it  is — of  being  quite  contemporary  must  be 
withheld  from  so  earnest  and  varied  a  novelist  as 
Margaret  Deland.  That  theological  agonies  like  those 
in  John  Ward,  Preacher  were  actually  suffered  a  gen- 
eration back  and  that  the  book  is  a  valuable  document 
upon  the  times  cannot  explain  away  the  fact  that 
Mrs.  Deland  herself  appears  to  have  been  partly  over- 
whelmed by  the  storm  which  sweeps  the  parish  of  her 
story.  So  in  her  later  novels  which  have  essayed  such 


22   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

problems  as  divorce,  the  compulsions  of  love,  the  in- 
evitable clash  of  parents  and  children,  she  tugs  at 
Gordian  knots  with  the  patient  fingers  of  goodwill 
when  one  slash  with  the  intelligence  would  cut  her 
difficulties  away.  Suppose  it  possible,  for  instance, 
that  the  heroine  of  The  Awakening  of  Helena  Richie 
could  have  been  courageous  enough  to  go  to  her  lover 
to  await  the  death  of  her  loathsome  husband  and  then 
could  have  been  so  timid  as  to  undergo  the  perturba- 
tions over  her  conduct  which  almost  break  her  heart 
in  Old  Chester — suppose  these  contradictions  might 
have  dwelt  together  in  Helena,  yet  could  Mrs.  Deland 
not  have  noted  and  anatomized  them  in  a  way  to  show 
that  she  saw  the  contradictions  even  while  recording 
them?  Suppose  that  Elizabeth  in  The  Iron  Woman 
was  expected  by  her  community  to  pay  superfluously 
for  an  hour's  blind  folly  with  a  lifetime  of  unhappiness 
and  did  undertake  so  to  pay  for  it,  yet  could  Mrs. 
Deland  not  have  pointed  out  that  the  situation  was 
repugnant  both  to  ordinary  common  sense  and  to  the 
very  code  of  honor  and  stability  which  in  the  end  per- 
suades David  and  Elizabeth  to  give  each  other  up? 

The  conclusions  of  these  novels,  which  to  thousands 
of  readers  have  seemed  stern  and  terrible,  are  in  reality 
terrible  chiefly  because  they  are  soft — soft  with  a  senti- 
mentalism  swathed  in  folds  of  piety.  The  customs  of 
Old  Chester  stifle  its  inhabitants,  who  take  a  kind  of 
stolid  joy  in  their  fetters;  and  Mrs.  Deland,  with  all 
her  understanding,  does  not  illuminate  them.  The 
movements  of  her  imagination  are  cumbered  by  a  too 


OLD  STYLE  23 

narrow — however  charming — cage.  Her  excellence  be- 
longs to  the  hours  when,  not  trying  to  transcend  her 
little  Pennsylvania  universe,  she  brings  accuracy  and 
shrewdness  and  felicity  to  the  chronicles  of  small  beer 
in  Old  Chester  Tales  and  Dr.  Lavendar's  People.  These 
strictures  and  this  praise  she  earns  by  her  adherence 
to  the  parochial  cult  of  local  color. 

2.     ROMANCE 

If  naturalism  was  a  reaction  from  the  small  beer 
of  local  color,  so,  in  another  fashion,  was  the  flare-up 
of  romance  which  attended  and  succeeded  the  Spanish 
War.  History  was  suddenly  discovered  to  be  wonder- 
ful no  less  than  humble  life;  and  so  was  adventure  in 
the  difficult  quarters  of  the  earth.  That  curious,  that 
lush  episode  of  fiction  endowed  American  literature 
with  a  phalanx  of  "best  sellers"  some  of  which  still 
continue  to  be  sold,  in  diminished  numbers;  and  it  en- 
dowed the  national  tradition  with  a  host  of  gallant 
personages  and  heroic  incidents  dug  up  out  of  old 
books  or  brought  back  from  far  quests  by  land  or 
water.  It  remains,  however,  an  episode;  the  rococo 
romancers  did  not  last.  Almost  without  exception 
they  turned  to  other  methods  as  the  romantic  mood 
faded  out  of  the  populace.  Of  those  who  had  em- 
ployed history  for  their  substance  only  James  Branch 
Cabell  remained  absolutely  faithful,  revising,  strength- 
ening, deepening  his  art  with  irony  and  beauty  until 
it  became  an  art  exquisitely  peculiar  to  himself. 


24   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Mary  Johnston  was  as  faithful,  but  her  fidelity  had 
less  growth  in  it.  Originally  attracted  to  the  heroic 
legend  of  colonial  Virginia,  she  has  since  so  far  de- 
parted from  it  as  to  produce  in  the  Long  Roll  and 
Cease  Firing  a  wide  panorama  of  the  Civil  War,  in 
other  books  to  study  the  historic  plight  and  current 
unrest  of  women,  and  here  and  there  to  show  an  observ- 
ant consciousness  of  the  changing  world;  but  her 
imagination  long  ago  sank  its  deepest  roots  into  the 
traditions  of  the  Old  Dominion.  She  brings  to  them, 
however,  no  fresh  interpretations,  as  satisfied  as  any 
medieval  romancer  to  ring  harmonious  changes  on  an- 
cient themes,  enlarging  them,  perhaps,  with  something 
spacious  in  her  language  and  liberal  in  her  sentiments, 
yet  transmitting  her  material  rather  as  a  singer  than 
as  a  poet,  agreeably  rather  than  creatively. 

As  Miss  Johnston  leans  upon  history  for  her  favor- 
ite staff,  so  James  Lane  Allen  leans  upon  "Nature." 
He  is  not,  indeed,  innocent  of  history.  His  Kentucky 
is  always  conscious  of  its  chivalric  past,  and  his  most 
popular  romance,  The  Choir  Invisible,  has  its  scene 
laid  in  and  near  the  Lexington  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury. Nor  is  he  innocent  of  the  devices  of  local  color. 
His  earliest  collection  of  tales — Flute  and  Violin — and 
his  ingratiating  comment  upon  it — The  Blue-Grass 
Region  of  Kentucky — once  for  all  established  the  char- 
acter which  his  chosen  district  has  in  the  world  of  the 
imagination.  But  from  the  first  he  held  principles  of 
art  which  would  not  allow  him  to  consider  either  his- 
tory or  local  color  as  ends  in  themselves.  He  believed 


OLD  STYLE  25 

they  must  be  employed,  when  employed,  as  elements 
contributory  to  some  general  effect  of  beauty  or  of 
meaning.  He  has  built  up  beauty  with  the  most  de- 
liberate hands,  and  he  has  sought  to  express  the  high- 
est meanings  in  his  art,  seeking  to  look  through  the 
"thin-aired  regions  of  consciousness  which  are  ruled 
over  by  Tact  to  the  underworld  of  consciousness  where 
are  situated  the  mighty  workshops,  and  where  toils  on 
forever  the  cyclopean  youth,  Instinct." 

In  this  important  program,  however,  he  has  con- 
stantly been  handicapped  by  his  orthodoxies.  John 
Gray,  in  The  Choir  Invisible,  loving  a  woman  who 
though  in  love  with  him  is  bound  in  marriage  to  an- 
other, engages  himself  to  a  young  girl,  shortly  after- 
ward to  find  that  his  real  love  is  free  again;  yet  with 
a  high  gesture  of  sacrifice  he  holds  to  his  engagement 
and  enters  upon  a  union  of  duty  which  is  sure  to  make 
two,  and  possibly  three,  persons  unhappy  instead  of 
one,  though  all  of  them  are  equally  guiltless.  Mr. 
Allen  approves  of  this  immoral  arithmetic  with  a  sen- 
timentalism  which  has  drawn  rains  of  tears  down 
thoughtless  cheeks.  So  in  The  Reign  of  Law  he  ex- 
hibits a  youth  extricating  himself  from  an  obsolete 
theology  with  sufferings  which  can  be  explained  only 
on  the  ground  that  the  theology  was  too  strong  ever 
to  have  been  escaped  or  the  youth  too  weak  ever  to 
have  rebelled.  And  in  Aftermath,  sequel  to  A  Ken- 
tucky Cardinal,  the  author  sentimentally  and  quite 
needlessly  stacks  the  cards  against  his  hero  and  lets 
his  heroine  die,  to  bring,  as  he  might  say,  "the  eternal 


26  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

note  of  sadness  in."  All  this  to  show  how  "Nature" 
holds  men  in  her  powerful  hands  and  tortures  them 
when  they  struggle  to  follow  the  mind  to  liberty !  To 
prove  a  thesis  so  profoundly  true  and  tragic  Mr.  Allen 
can  do  no  more  than  borrow  the  tricks  of  melodrama. 
Just  how  melodramatic  his  sentimentalism  forces  him 
to  be  has  often  been  overlooked  because  of  his  diction 
and  his  pictures.  Though  he  tends  to  the  mellifluous 
anci  the  saccharine  he  has  in  his  better  pages  a  dewy, 
luminous  style,  with  words  choicely  picked  out  and 
cadences  delicately  manipulated.  By  comparison  most 
of  the  local  colorists  of  his  period  seem  homespun  and 
most  of  the  romancers  a  little  tawdry.  His  method  is 
the  mosaicist's,  working  self-consciously  in  fine  ma- 
terials. Movement  with  him  never  leaps  nor  flows;  in 
fact,  it  seems  to  dawdle  when,  too  often,  he  forgets  to 
be  vigilant  in  the  interests  of  simplicity;  it  is  languid 
with  scrupulous  hesitations  and  accumulations.  As 
to  his  pictures,  they  come  from  a  Kentucky  glorified. 
When  he  says  that  in  June  there  "the  warm-eyed, 
bronzed,  foot-stamping  young  bucks  forsake  their 
plowshares  in  the  green  rows,  their  reapers  among  the 
yellow  beards;  and  the  bouncing,  laughing,  round- 
breasted  girls  arrange  their  ribbons  and  their  vows," 
Mr.  Allen  is  remembering  Theocritus,  the  Pervigilium 
Ven^ris,  and  the  silver  ages  of  literature  no  less  than 
his  own  state  and  his  own  day.  He  uses  local  color 
habitually  to  ennoble  it,  and  but  for  his  extravagant 
taste  for  sweetness  he  might  have  achieved  pastorals 
of  an  imperishable  sort. 


OLD  STYLE  27 

Even  as  it  is,  the  Kentucky  Cardinal-Aftermath 
story  has  all  the  quaint  grace  of  pressed  flowers  and 
remembered  valentines,  and  Summer  in  Arcady,  his 
masterpiece,  has  at  once  rich  passion  and  spare  form. 
Here  Mr.  Allen  is  at  his  best,  representing  young  love 
springing  up  fiercely,  exuberantly,  against  a  lovely 
background  congenial  to  the  human  mood.  He  has  not 
known,  however,  how  to  keep  up  that  difficult  equi- 
librium between  artifice  and  simplicity  which  the  idyl 
demands.  His  later  books  tend  to  be  turgid,  oppres- 
sive, cloying  with  sentimentalism  and  amorous  obses- 
sions in  their  graver  moments,  and  in  their  lighter  mo- 
ments to  fall  flat  from  a  lack  of  the  true  sinews  of 
comedy. 

Of  a  temper  as  different  as  possible  from  Mr.  Allen's 
was  Edgar  Saltus,  just  dead,  who  stood  alone  and  de- 
cadent in  a  country  which  the  fin  de  siecle  scarcely 
touched  with  its  graceful,  graceless  maladies.  He 
began  his  career,  after  a  penetrating  study  of  Balzac, 
with  The  Philosophy  of  Disenchantment  and  The 
Anatomy  of  Negation,  erudite,  witty  challenges  to 
illusion,  deriving  primarily  from  Hartmann  and  Schop- 
enhauer but  enriching  their  arguments  with  much  in- 
quisitive learning  in  current  French  philosophers  and 
poets.  Erudition,  however,  was  not  Saltus's  sole  equip- 
ment: his  pessimism  came,  in  part,  from  his  literary 
masters  but  in  part  also  from  a  temperament  which 
steadily  followed  its  own  impulses  and  arrived  at  its 
own  destinations.  Cynical,  deracinated,  he  turned  from 
his  speculative  doubts  to  the  positive  realities  of  sense, 


28   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

becoming  the  historian  of  love  and  loveliness  in  sump- 
tuous, perverse  phases.  In  Mary  Magdalen  he  dressed 
up  a  traditional  courtesan  in  the  splendors  of  purple 
and  gold  and  perfumed  her  with  many  quaint,  dangerous 
essences  more  exciting  than  her  later  career  as  penitent ; 
in  Imperial  Purple  he  undertook  a  chronicle  of  the 
Roman  emperors  from  Julius  Caesar  to  Heliogabolus, 
exhibiting  them  in  the  most  splendid  of  all  their  ex- 
travagances and  sins;  in  Historia  Amoris  he  followed 
the  maddening  trail  of  love  and  in  The  Lords  of  the 
Ghostland  the  saddening  trail  of  faith  through  the 
annals  of  mankind. 

He  wrote  novels,  too,  of  contemporary  life,  but  they 
are  his  least  notable  achievements.  His  personages  in 
none  of  these  novels  manage  to  convince;  his  plots  are 
melodrama ;  his  worldly  wisdom  has  smirks  and  postures 
in  it;  his  style,  now  sharp  now  sagging,  is  unequal. 
Saltus  could  not,  it  seems,  dispense  with  antiquity 
and  remoteness  in  his  books.  Only  when  buried  in  the 
deep  world  of  ancient  story  or  when  ranging  through 
the  widest  field  of  time  did  he  become  most  himself. 
Then  he  invited  no  comparisons  with  familiar  actualities 
and  could  assemble  the  most  magnificent  glories  ac- 
cording to  his  whims  and  could  drape  them  in  the 
most  gorgeous  stuffs.  What  especially  touched  his 
imagination  was  the  spectacle  of  imperial  Rome  as  in- 
terpreted to  him  by  French  decadence:  that  lust  for 
power  and  sensation,  those  incredible  temples,  palaces, 
feasts,  revelries,  blasphemies,  butcheries.  Commencing 
with  a  beauty  which  knew  no  bounds,  he  moved  on  to 


OLD  STYLE  29 

lust  or  satiety  or  impotence  for  his  theme;  in  the  end 
he  brought  little  but  a  glittering  ferocity  to  that  cold 
chronicle  of  the  czars  from  Ivan  to  Catherine,  The 
Imperial  Orgy.  His  phrases  never  failed  him,  flashing 
like  gems  or  snakes  and  clasping  his  exuberant  materials 
in  almost  the  only  discipline  they  ever  had.  Wit  with- 
held him  from  utter  lusciousness.  Though  he  employed 
Corinthian  cadences  and  diction,  he  kept  continually 
checking  them  with  the  cynic  twist  of  some  deft  collo* 
quialism.  To  venture  into  his  microcosm  is  to  bid 
farewell  to  all  that  is  simple  and  kindly ;  it  is,  however, 
to  discover  the  terrible  beauty  that  lurks  behind  corrup- 
tion, malevolent  though  delirious. 

Romance  of  the  traditionary  sort,  it  is  plain,  has 
lately  lost  its  vogue  in  the  United  States  and  is  being 
neglected  as  at  almost  no  other  period  since  Fenimore 
Cooper  established  its  principal  native  modes.  The 
ancient  romantic  matters  of  the  Settlement  and  the 
Revolution  flourish  almost  solely  in  tales  for  boys. 
There  is  of  course  still  a  matter  of  the  Frontier,  but 
it  is  another  frontier:  the  Canadian  North  and  North- 
west, Alaska,  the  islands  of  the  South  Seas,  latterly 
the  battle  fields  of  France,  and  always  the  trails  of 
American  exploration  wherever  they  may  chance  to 
lead.  The  performers  upon  such  themes — the  Rex 
Beaches,  the  Emerson  Houghs,  the  Randall  Parrishes, 
the  Zane  Greys,  the  James  Oliver  Curwoods — march 
ordinarily  under  the  noisy  banner  of  "red  blood"  and 
derive  from  Stephen  Crane,  Frank  Norris,  Jack  Lon- 
don, those  generous  boys  of  naturalism  whose  tempera- 


80  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

ments  carried  them  again  and  again  into  the  territories 
of  vivid  danger.  Criticism  notes  in  the  later  annalists 
of  "red  blood"  their  spasmodic  energy,  their  consider- 
able technical  knowledge,  their  stereotyped  characters, 
their  recurrent  formulas,  their  uncritical,  Rooseveltian 
opinions,  their  enormous  popularity,  their  almost  com- 
plete lack  of  distinction  in  style  or  attitude,  and  passes 
by  without  further  obligation  than  to  point  out  that 
Stewart  Edward  White  probably  deserves  to  stand  first 
among  them  by  virtue  of  a  certain  substantial  range 
and  panoramic  faithfulness  to  the  life  of  the  lumbermen 
represented  in  his  most  successful  book,  The  Blazed 
Trail. 

This  phase  of  life  deserves  particular  emphasis  for 
the  reason  that  there  has  recently  been  growing  up 
among  the  lumber-camps  from  the  Bay  of  Fundy  to 
Puget  Sound  the  legend  of  a  mythical  hero  named  Paul 
Bunyan  who  is  the  only  personage  of  the  sort  yet  in- 
vented and  elaborated  by  the  ordinary  run  of  men  in 
any  American  calling.  Paul  is  less  a  patron  saint  of 
the  loggers  than  an  autochthonous  Munchausen,  whose 
fame  has  been  extended  almost  entirely  by  word  of 
mouth  among  lumbermen  resting  from  their  work  and 
vying  with  one  another  to  see  who  could  tell  the  most 
stupendous  yarn  about  Paul's  prowess  and  achieve- 
ments. The  process  resembles  that  which  in  the  folk 
everywhere  has  evolved  enormous  legends  about  favor- 
ite heroes;  the  legend  concerning  Paul,  however,  is 
essentially  native  in  its  accurate  geography,  in  its  pas- 
sion for  grotesque  exaggeration,  in  its  hilarious  meta- 


OLD  STYLE  31 

phors,  in  its  dry,  drawling,  straight-faced  narrative 
method.  Exaggeration  such  as  that  in  some  of  these 
stories  verges  upon  genius.  When  Paul  goes  West  he 
carelessly  lets  his  pick  drag  behind  him  and  cuts  out 
the  Grand  Canyon  of  the  Colorado;  he  raises  corn  in 
Kansas  prodigious  enough  to  suck  the  Mississippi  dry 
and  stop  navigation ;  he  builds  a  hotel  so  high  that  he 
has  "the  last  seven  stories  put  on  hinges  so's  they  could 
be  swung  back  for  to  let  the  moon  go  by" ;  he  achieves 
such  feats  of  eating  and  drinking  and  working  and 
fighting  and  loving  as  make  Hercules  himself  seem  a 
pallid  fellow  who  should  have  gone  upon  the  rowdy 
American  frontier  to  learn  the  great  ways  of  adven- 
ture. Though  it  is  true  that  the  legend  has  been  de- 
veloping for  many  years  without  adequate  literary  use 
of  it  having  yet  been  made,  it  lies  ready  for  romance 
to  handle;  and  no  discussion  of  contemporary  Ameri- 
can fiction  can  go  deeper  than  the  surfaces  without  at 
least  mentioning  that  hilarious  chapbook  Paul  Bunyan 
Comes  West. 

That  romance  is  just  now  being  slighted  appears 
from  the  lamentable  hiatus  into  which  the  fame  of 
Charles  D.  Stewart  has  lately  fallen.  His  Partners  of 
Providence  suffers  from  the  inevitable  comparison  with 
Tom  Sawyer  and  Huckleberry  Finn  which  it  cannot 
stand,  though  it  continues  the  saga  of  the  Mississippi 
with  sympathy  and  knowledge ;  but  The  Fugitive  Black- 
smith has  a  flavor  which  few  comparisons  and  no 
neglect  can  spoil.  Its  protagonist,  wrongly  accused 
of  a  murder  which  he  by  mischance  finds  it  difficult 


32   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

to  explain,  takes  to  his  heels  and  lives  by  his  mechanic 
wits  among  the  villages  of  the  lower  Mississippi  through 
a  diversity  of  adventures  which  puts  his  story  among 
the  little  masterpieces  of  the  picaresque.  Though  it  is 
clumsily  garnished  with  irrelevant  things,  it  stands  out 
above  them,  racy,  rememberable.  The  blacksmith  has 
an  ingenuity  as  varied  as  his  experiences.  Whereas 
other  picaroes  cheat  or  fight  or  love  their  ways,  this 
hero  uses  his  dexterity  at  unaccustomed  trades  until 
it  is  little  less  than  intoxicating  to  see  him  rise  to  each 
emergency.  He  is  a  proletarian  Odysseus,  and  his 
history  is  a  quaint  Odyssey  of  the  roving  artisan. 

The  matter  of  the  Civil  War,  though  very  large  in 
the  American  memory,  has  in  literature  not  quite 
reached  a  parity  with  the  older  matters  of  the  Settle- 
ment, the  Revolution,  and  the  Frontier,  principally,  no 
doubt,  because  there  has  been  only  one  period — and 
that  a  brief  one — of  historical  romance  since  the  war. 
In  connection  with  this  matter,  however,  there  has 
been  created  the  legend  which  at  present  is  surely  the 
most  potent  of  all  the  legendary  elements  dear  to  the 
American  imagination. 

Abraham  Lincoln  is,  strictly  speaking,  more  than  a 
legend;  he  has  become  a  cult.  Immediately  after  his 
death  he  lived  in  the  national  mind  for  a  time  as  pri- 
marily a  martyr;  then  emphasis  shifted  to  his  humor 
and  a  whole  literature  of  waggish  tales  and  retorts  and 
apologues  assembled  around  his  name;  then  he  passed 
into  a  more  sentimental  zone  and  endless  stories  were 
multiplied  about  his  natural  piety  and  his  habit  of 


OLD  STYLE  33 

pardoning  innocent  offenders.  Out  of  the  efflorescence 
of  all  these  aspects  of  legend  which  accompanied  the 
centenary  of  his  birth  there  has  since  seemed  to  be 
emerging — though  the  older  aspects  still  persist  as 
well — a  conception  of  him  as  a  figure  at  once  lofty  and 
familiar,  at  once  sad  and  witty,  at  once  Olympian  and 
human.  Among  poets  of  all  grades  of  opinion  Lincoln 
is  the  chief  native  hero :  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson  has 
best  expressed  in  words  as  firm  as  bronze  the  Master's 
reputation  for  lonely  pride  and  forgiving  laughter; 
John  Gould  Fletcher,  with  an  eloquence  found  nowhere 
else  in  his  work,  likens  Lincoln  to  a  tree  so  mighty  that 
its  branches  reach  the  heavens  and  its  roots  the  primal 
rock  and  nations  of  men  may  rest  in  its  shade;  Edgar 
Lee  Masters,  whose  work  is  full  of  the  shadow  and  light 
of  Lincoln,  has  made  his  most  moving  lyric  an  epitaph 
upon  Ann  Rutledge,  the  girl  Lincoln  loved  and  lost; 
and  Vachel  Lindsay,  in  Lincoln's  own  Springfield,  dur- 
ing the  World  War  thought  of  him  as  so  stirred  even 
in  death  by  the  horrors  which  then  alarmed  the  uni- 
verse that  he  could  not  sleep  but  walked  up  and  down 
the  midnight  streets,  mourning  and  brooding.  It  is 
precisely  thus,  in  other  ages,  that  saints  are  said  to 
appear  at  difficult  moments,  to  quiet  the  waves  or  turn 
the  arrow  aside.  Without  these  more  vulgar  manifes- 
tations Lincoln  nevertheless  lives  as  the  founder  of 
every  cult  lives,  in  the  echoes  of  his  voice  on  many 
tongues  and  in  the  vibrations  of  his  voice  in  many 
infections. 

The  novelists,  unfortunately,  fall  behind  the  poets  in 


34  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

the  beauty  and  wisdom  with  which  they  celebrate  the 
figure  of  Lincoln,  though  they  have  produced  scores  of 
volumes  associated  with  it,  upon  the  life  not  only  of 
Lincoln  himself  but  of  his  mother,  of  his  children,  of 
this  or  that  friend  or  neighbor.  Of  the  various  novels 
- — from  Winston  Churchill's  The  Crisis  to  Irving 
Bacheller's  A  Man  for  the  Ages — which  have  sought  to 
mingle  the  right  proportions  of  rural  shrewdness  and 
honorable  dignity,  no  one  has  yet  been  equal  to  the 
magnitude  of  its  theme.  They  have  followed  the  cus- 
tomary paths  of  the  historical  romance  without  seem- 
ing to  realize  that  in  a  theme  so  spacious  they  could 
learn  from  the  methods  of  Plato  with  Socrates,  of 
Shakespeare  with  his  kingly  heroes,  of  the  biographers 
of  Francis  of  Assisi  with  their  gracious  saint. 

Few  literary  tasks  are  harder  than  the  task  of  the 
critic  holding  a  steady  course  through  the  welter  of 
novels  which  make  a  tumult  in  the  world  and  trying  to 
indicate  those  which  have  some  genuine  significance  as 
works  of  art  or  intelligence  or  as  documents  upon  the 
time.  How  shall  he  dispose,  for  example,  of  such  be- 
guilers  of  the  millions  as  Gene  Stratton  Porter,  who 
piles  sentimentalism  upon  "Nature"  till  the  soft  heap 
defies  analysis,  and  Harold  Bell  Wright,  who  cannily 
mixes  sentimentalism  with  valor  and  prudence  till  the 
resultant  blend  tempts  appetites  uncounted?  Popu- 
larity has  its  arts  no  less  than  excellence;  and  so  has 
it  its  own  kind  of  seriousness.  Much  as  the  advertiser 
and  the  salesman  have  done  to  market  tons  of  Mrs. 


OLD  STYLE  35 

Porter  and  Mr.  Wright,  they  could  not  have  done  it 
without  the  assistance  furnished  them  by  the  fact  that 
their  authors  believe  and  feel  the  things  they  write. 
They  throb  with  all  the  popular  impulses ;  they  laugh 
when  the  multitude  laughs  and  weep  when  it  weeps; 
and  they  have  the  gift — which  is  really  rare  not 
common — of  calling  the  multitude's  attention  to  their 
books  in  which  is  displayed,  as  in  a  consoling  mirror, 
the  sweet,  rosy,  empty  features  of  banality. 

How  shall  the  patient  critic  dispose  of  Robert  W. 
Chambers,  who,  possessing  in  a  high  degree  the  quali- 
ties of  narrative,  of  costume,  of  dramatic  effectiveness, 
of  satire  even  (as  witness  lole),  has  drifted  with  the 
fashions  for  a  generation  and  has  latterly  allowed  him- 
self to  decline  to  the  manufacture  of  literary  sillibub 
in  the  guise  of  novels  about  the  smart  set  and  Bohemia  ? 
How  shall  the  stern  critic  dispose  of  Gertrude  Ather- 
ton,  who  knows  so  much  about  California,  New  York, 
and  the  international  scene  but  who  somehow  fails  to 
transmute  her  materials  to  any  lasting  metal  and 
leaves  the  impression  of  a  vexed  aristocrat  scolding  the 
age  without  either  convincing  it  or  convicting  it  of 
very  serious  deficiencies?  How  shall  the  accurate  critic 
dispose  of  Frank  Harris,  who  was  born  in  Ireland  and 
who  had  the  most  conspicuous  part  of  his  career  in 
England,  but  who  is  a  naturalized  American  citizen 
and  who  has  written  in  The  Bomb  a  vivid  and  intel- 
ligent novel  dealing  with  the  Chicago  "anarchists"  of 
1886?  How  shall  the  conscientious  critic  dispose  of 
the  Owen  Johnsons  and  the  Rupert  Hugheses  and  the 


36  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Gouverneur  Morrises  and  the  George  Barr  McCutch- 
eons  with  all  their  energy  and  information  and  good 
intentions  and  yet  with  their  fatal  lack  of  true  dis- 
tinction ? 

How  shall  the  tolerant  critic  dispose  of  the  writers 
of  detective  stories  whose  name  is  legion  and  whose 
art  is  to  fine  fiction  as  arithmetic  to  calculus — particu- 
larly Arthur  Reeve,  inventor  of  that  Craig  Kennedy 
who  with  endless  ingenuity  solves  problem  after  prob- 
lem by  the  introduction  of  scientific  and  pseudo- 
scientific  novelties?  How  shall  the  puzzled  critic  dis- 
pose of  Alice  Duer  Miller  and  her  light,  bright  stories 
of  fashionable  life;  of  Edward  Lucas  White  and  his 
vast  panoramas  of  South  America  and  the  ancient 
world;  of  Katherine  Fullerton  Gerould,  with  her  grim 
tales  and  her  petulant  conservatism;  of  those  ener- 
getic successors  of  O.  Henry,  Edna  Ferber  and  Fanny 
Hurst ;  of  the  late  Charles  Emmet  Van  Loan,  with  his 
intimate  knowledge  of  sport ;  of  the  schools  and  swarms 
of  men  and  women  who  write  short  stories  for  the  most 
part  but  who  occasionally  essay  a  novel?  How  shall 
the  worried  critic  dispose  of  the  more  or  less  profes- 
sional humorists  who  have  created  characters  and  local- 
ities :  Irvin  S.  Cobb,  who,  capable  of  better  things,  pre- 
fers the  paths  of  the  grotesque  and  rolls  his  bulk 
through  current  literature  laughing  at  his  own  misad- 
ventures; Finley  Peter  Dunne,  inventor  of  that  Mr. 
Dooley  who  makes  it  clear  that  the  American  tradition 
which  invented  Poor  Richard  is  still  alive;  Ring  W. 
Lardner,  master  of  the  racy  vernacular  of  the  almost 


OLD  STYLE  37 

illiterate;  George  Ade,  easily  first  of  his  class,  fabulist 
and  satirist? 

Perhaps  it  is  best  for  the  baffled  critic  to  leave  all 
of  them  to  time  and,  singling  out  the  ten  living  novel- 
ists who  seem  to  him  most  distinguished  or  significant, 
to  study  them  one  by  one,  adding  some  account  of  the 
school  of  fiction  just  now  predominant. 


CHAPTER  H 

ARGUMENT 

1.     HAMLIN  GARLAND 

The  pedigree  of  the  most  energetic  and  important 
fiction  now  being  written  in  the  United  States  goes 
unmistakably  back  to  that  ^creative  uprising  of  dis- 
content in  the  eighties  of  the  last  century  which 
brought  into  articulate  consciousness  the  larger  share 
of  the  aspects  of  unrest  which  have  since  continued  to 
challenge  the  nation's  magnificent,  arrogant  grand 
march. 

The  decade  had  Henry  Adams  for  its  bitter  philoso- 
pher, despairing  over  current  political  corruption  and 
turning  away  to  probe  the  roots  of  American  policy 
under  Jefferson  and  his  immediate  successors ;  had  the 
youthful  Theodore  Roosevelt  for  its  standard-bearer 
of  a  civic  conscience  which  was,  plans  went,  to  bring 
virtue  into  caucuses ;  had  Henry  George  for  its  spokes- 
man of  economic  change,  moving  across  the  continent 
from  California  to  New  York  with  an  argument  and  a 
program  for  new  battles  against  privilege ;  had  Edward 
Bellamy  for  its  Utopian  romancer,  setting  forth  a  de- 
lectable picture  of  what  human  society  might  become 
were  the  old  iniquities  reasonably  wiped  away  and  co- 

38 


ARGUMENT  39 

operative  order  brought  out  of  competitive  chaos ;  had 
William  Dean  Howells  for  its  annalist  of  manners, 
turning  toward  the  end  of  the  decade  from  his  benevo- 
lent acceptance  of  the  world  as  it  was  to  stout-hearted, 
though  soft-voiced,  accusations  brought  in  the  name 
of  Tolstoy  and  the  Apostles  against  human  inequality 
however  constituted ;  had — to  end  the  list  of  instances 
without  going  outside  the  literary  class — Hamlin 
Garland  for  its  principal  spokesman  of  the  distress  and 
dissatisfaction  then  stirring  along  the  changed  frontier 
which  so  long  as  free  land  lasted  had  been  the  natural 
outlet  for  the  expansive,  restless  race. 

Heretofore  the  prairies  and  the  plains  had  depended 
almost  wholly  upon  romance — and  that  often  of  the 
cheapest  sort — for  their  literary  reputation;  Mr. 
Garland,  who  had  tested  at  first  hand  the  innumerable 
hardships  of  such  a  life,  became  articulate  through  his 
dissent  from  average  notions  about  the  pioneer.  His 
earliest  motives  of  dissent  seem  to  have  been  personal 
and  artistic.  During  that  youth  which  saw  him  borne 
steadily  westward,  from  his  Wisconsin  birthplace  to 
windy  Iowa  and  then  to  bleak  Dakota,  his  own  in- 
stincts clashed  with  those  of  his  migratory  father  as 
the  instincts  of  many  a  sensitive,  unremembered  youth 
must  have  clashed  with  the  dumb,  fierce  urges  of  the 
leaders  of  migration  everywhere.  The  younger  Gar- 
land hungered  on  the  frontier  for  beauty  and  learning 
and  leisure ;  the  impulse  which  eventually  detached  him 
from  Dakota  and  sent  him  on  a  trepid,  reverent  pil- 
grimage to  Boston  was  the  very  impulse  which,  on 


40  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

another  scale,  had  lately  detached  Henry  James  from 
his  native  country  and  had  sent  him  to  the  ancient 
home  of  his  forefathers  in  the  British  Isles. 

Mr.  Garland  could  neither  feel  so  free  nor  fly  so  far 
from  home  as  James.  He  had,  in  the  midst  of  his 
raptures  and  his  successes  in  New  England,  still  to 
remember  the  plight  of  the  family  he  had  left  behind 
him  on  the  lonely  prairie;  he  cherished  a  patriotism  for 
his  province  which  went  a  long  way  toward  restoring 
him  to  it  in  time.  Sentimental  and  romantic  considera- 
tions, however,  did  not  influence  him  altogether  in  his 
first  important  work.  He  had  been  kindled  by  Howells 
in  Boston  to  a  passion  for  realism  which  carried  him 
beyond  the  suave  accuracy  of  his  master  to  the  somber 
veracity  of  Main-Travelled  Roads,  Prairie  Folks,  and 
Rose  of  Dutcher's  Coolly.  This  veracity  was  more 
than  somber;  it  was  deliberate  and  polemic.  Mr.  Gar- 
land, ardently  a  radical  of  the  school  of  Henry  George, 
had  enlisted  in  the  crusade  against  poverty,  and  he 
desired  to  tell  the  unheeded  truth  about  the  frontier 
farmers  and  their  wives  in  language  which  might  do 
something  to  lift  the  desperate  burdens  of  their  con- 
dition. Consequently  his  passions  and  his  doctrines 
joined  hands  to  fix  the  direction  of  his  art;  he  both 
hated  the  frontier  and  hinted  at  definite  remedies  which 
he  thought  would  make  it  more  endurable. 

It  throws  a  strong  light  upon  the  progress  of  Ameri- 
can society  and  literature  during  the  past  generation 
to  point  out  that  the  service  recently  performed  by 
Main  Street  was,  in  its  fashion,  performed  thirty  years 


ARGUMENT  41 

ago  by  Mam-Travelled  Roads.  Each  book  challenges 
the  myth  of  the  rural  beauties  and  the  rural  virtues; 
but  whereas  Sinclair  Lewis,  in  an  intellectual  and 
satiric  age,  charges  that  the  villagers  are  dull,  Mr. 
Garland,  in  a  moral  and  pathetic  age,  charged  that  the 
farmers  were  oppressed.  His  men  wrestle  fearfully 
with  sod  and  mud  and  drought  and  blizzard,  goaded  by 
mortgages  which  may  at  almost  any  moment  snatch 
away  all  that  labor  and  parsimony  have  stored  up. 
His  women,  endowed  with  no  matter  what  initial  hopes 
or  charms,  are  sacrificed  to  overwork  and  deprivations 
and  drag  out  maturity  and  old  age  on  the  weariest 
treadmill.  The  pressure  of  life  is  simply  too  heavy 
to  be  borne  except  by  the  ruthless  or  the  crafty.  Mr. 
Garland,  though  nourished  on  the  popular  legend  of 
the  frontier,  had  come  to  feel  that  the  "song  of  emi- 
gration had  been,  in  effect,  the  hymn  of  fugitives." 
Illusion  no  less  than  reality  had  tempted  Americans 
toward  their  far  frontiers,  and  the  enormous  mass, 
once  under  way,  had  rolled  stubbornly  westward, 
crushing  all  its  members  who  might  desire  to  hesitate 
or  to  reflect. 

The  romancers  had  studied  the  progress  of  the  fron- 
tier in  the  lives  of  its  victors:  Mr.  Garland  studied  it. 
in  the  lives  of  its  victims :  thp  private  soldier  returning 
drably  and  mutely  from  the  war  to  resume  his  drab, 
mute  career  behind  the  plow;  the  tenant  caught  in  a 
trap  by  his  landlord  and  the  law  and  obliged  to  pay 
for  the  added  value  which  his  own  toil  has  given  to  his 
farm;  the  brother  neglected  until  his  courage  has  died 


42  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

and  proffered  assistance  comes  too  late  to  rouse  him; 
and  particularly  the  daughter  whom  a  harsh  father  or 
the  wife  whom  a  brutal  husband  breaks  or  drives  away 
— the  most  sensitive  and  therefore  the  most  pitiful 
victims  of  them  all.  Mr.  Garland  told  his  early  stories 
in  the  strong,  level,  ominous  language  of  a  man  who 
had  observed  much  but  chose  to  write  little.  Not  his 
words  but  the  overtones  vibrating  through  them  cry 
out  that  the  earth  and  the  fruits  of  the  earth  belong  to 
all  men  and  yet  a  few  of  them  have  turned  tiger  or 
dog  or  jackal  and  snatched  what  is  precious  for  them- 
selves while  their  fellows  starve  and  freeze.  Insoluble 
as  are  the  dilemmas  he  propounded  and  tense  and  un- 
relieved as  his  accusations  were,  he  stood  in  his  methods 
nearer,  say,  to  the  humane  Millet  than  to  the  angry 
Zola.  There  is  a  clear,  high  splendor  about  his  land- 
scapes; youth  and  love  on  his  desolate  plains,  as  well 
as  anywhere,  can  find  glory  in  the  most  difficult  ex- 
istence ;  he  might  strip  particular  lives  relentlessly  bare 
but  he  no  less  relentlessly  clung  to  the  conviction  that 
human  life  has  an  inalienable  dignity  which  is  deeper 
than  any  glamor  goes  and  can  survive  the  loss  of  all 
its  trappings. 

Why  did  Mr.  Garland  not  equal  the  intellectual  and 
artistic  success  of  Mairb-T ravelled  Roads,  Prairie 
Folks,  and  Rose  of  DutcJwr's  Coolly  for  a  quarter  of 
a  century?  At  the  outset  he  had  passion,  knowledge, 
industry,  doctrine,  approbation,  and  he  labored  hard 
at  enlarging  the  sagas  of  which  these  books  were  the 
center.  Yet  Jason  Edwards,  A  Spoil  of  Office,  A  Mem- 


ARGUMENT  43 

ber  of  the  Third  House  are  dim  names  and  the  Far 
Western  tales  which  succeeded  them  grow  too  rapidly 
less  impressive  as  they  grow  older.  The  rise  of  his- 
torical romance  among  the  American  followers  of 
Stevenson  at  the  end  of  the  century  and  the  subsequent 
rise  of  flippancy  under  the  leadership  of  O.  Henry 
have  both  been  blamed  for  the  partial  eclipse  into 
which  Mr.  Garland's  reputation  passed.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  causes  were  more  fundamental  than  the 
mere  fickleness  of  literary  reputation  or  than  the  de- 
mands of  editors  and  public  that  he  repeat  himself 
forever.  In  that  first  brilliant  cycle  of  stories  this 
downright  pioneer  worked  with  the  material  which  of 
all  materials  he  knew  best  and  over  which  his  imagina- 
tion played  most  eagerly.  From  them,  however,  he 
turned  to  pleas  for  the  single  tax  and  to  exposures 
of  legislative  corruption  and  imbecility  about  which  he 
neither  knew  nor  cared  so  much  as  he  knew  and  cared 
about  the  actual  lives  of  working  farmers.  His  imagi- 
nation, whatever  his  zeal  might  do  in  these  different 
surroundings,  would  not  come  to  the  old  point  of  in- 
candescence. 

Instead,  however,  of  diagnosing  his  case  correctly 
Mr.  Garland  followed  the  false  light  of  local  color  to 
the  Rocky  Mountains  and  began  the  series  of  romantic 
narratives  which  further  interrupted  his  true  growth 
and,  gradually,  his  true  fame.  He  who  had  grimly 
refused  to  lend  his  voice  to  the  chorus  chanting  the 
popular  legend  of  the  frontier  in  which  he  had  grown 
up  and  who  had  studied  the  deceptive  picture  not  as  a 


jtT 


44    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

visitor  but  as  a  native,  now  became  himself  a  visiting 
enthusiast  for  the  "high  trails"  and  let  himself  be 
roused  by  a  fervor  sufficiently  like  that  from  which  he 
had  earlier  dissented.  In  his  different  way  he  was  as 
hungry  for  new  lands  as  his  father  had  been  before 
him.  Looking  upon  local  color  as  the  end  —  when  it  is 
more  accurately  the  beginning  —  of  fiction,  he  felt  that 
he  had  exhausted  his  old  community  and  must  move 
on  to  fresher  pastures. 

Here  the  prime  fallacy  of  his  school  misled  him:  he 
believed  that  if  he  had  represented  the  types  and  scenes 
of  his  particular  region  once  he  had  done  all  he  could, 
when  of  course  had  he  let  imagination  serve  him  he 
might  have  found  in  that  microcosm  as  many  passions 
and  tragedies  and  j  oys  as  he  or  any  novelist  could  have 
needed  for  a  lifetime.  Here,  too,  the  prime  penalty 
°f  his  school  overtook  him:  he  came  to  lay  so  much  em- 
.phasis  upon  outward  manners  that  he  let  his  plots  and 
characters  fall  into  routine  and  formula.  The  novels 
of  his  middle  period  —  such  as  Her  Mountain  Lover, 
The  Captain  of  the  Gray  Horse  Troop,  Hester,  The 
Light  of  the  Star,  Cavanagh,  Forest  Ranger  —  too 
frequently  recur  to  the  romantic  theme  of  a  love  unit- 
ing some  powerful,  uneducated  frontiersman  and  some 
girl  from  a  politer  neighborhood.  Pioneer  and  lady 
are  always  almost  the  same  pair  in  varying  costumes  ; 
the  stories  harp  upon  the  praise  of  plains  and  moun- 
tains and  the  scorn  of  cities  and  civilization.  These 
romances,  much  value  as  they  have  as  documents  and 
will  long  continue  to  have,  must  be  said  to  exhibit  the 


ARGUMENT  45 

frontier  as  self-conscious,  obstreperous,  given  to  in- 
sisting upon  its  difference  from  the  rest  of  the  world. 
In  ordinary  human  intercourse  such  insistence  eventu- 
ally becomes  tiresome;  in  literature  no  less  than  in  life 
there  is  a  time  to  remember  local  traits  and  a  time  to 
forget  them  in  concerns  more  universal. 

What  concerns  of  Mr.  Garland's  were  universal  be- 
came evident  when  he  published  A  Son  of  the  Middle 
Border.  His  enthusiasms  might  be  romantic  but  his 
imagination  was  not ;  it  was  indissolubly  married  to  his 
memory  of  actual  events.  The  formulas  of  his  moun- 
tain romances,  having  been  the  inventions  of  a  mind 
not  essentially  inventive,  had  been  at  best  no  more  than 
sectional;  the  realities  of  his  autobiography,  taking 
him  back  again  to  Main-Travelled  Roads  and  its  cycle, 
were  personal,  lyrical,  and  consequently  universal.  All 
along,  it  now  appeared,  he  had  been  at  his  best  when  he 
was  most  nearly  autobiographical:  those  vivid  early 
stories  had  come  from  the  lives  of  his  own  family  or  of 
their  neighbors;  Rose  of  Dutcher's  Coolly  had  set 
forth  what  was  practically  his  own  experience  in  its 
account  of  a  heroine — not  hero — who  leaves  her  na- 
tive farm  to  go  first  to  a  country  college  and  then  to 
Chicago  to  pursue  a  wider  life,  torn  constantly  be- 
tween a  passion  for  freedom  and  a  loyalty  to  the  father 
she  must  tragically  desert. 

In  a  sense  A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border  supersedes  the 
fictive  versions  of  the  same  material ;  they  are  the  origi- 
nal documents  and  the  Son  the  final  redaction  and  com- 
mentary. Veracious  still,  the  son  of  that  border  ap- 


46    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

pears  no  longer  vexed  as  formerly.  Memory,  parent  of 
art,  has  at  once  sweetened  and  enlarged  the  scene. 
What  has  been  lost  of  pungent  vividness  has  its  com- 
pensation in  a  broader,  a  more  philosophic  interpre- 
tation of  the  old  frontier,  which  in  this  record  grows 
to  epic  meanings  and  dimensions.  Its  savage  hard- 
ships, though  never  minimized,  take  their  due  place  in 
its  powerful  history;  the  defeat  which  the  victims 
underwent  cannot  rob  the  victors  of  their  many  claims 
to  glory.  If  there  was  little  contentment  in  this  border 
there  was  still  much  rapture.  Such  things  Mr.  Garland 
reveals  without  saying  them  too  plainly :  the  epic  quali- 
ties of  his  book — as  in  Mark  Twain's  Life  on  the 
Mississippi — lie  in  its  implications ;  the  tale  itself  is  a 
candid  narrative  of  his  own  adventures  through  child- 
hood, youth,  and  his  first  literary  period. 

This  autobiographic  method,  applied  with  success 
in  A  Daughter  of  the  Middle  Border  to  his  later  life 
in  Chicago  and  all  the  regions  which  he  visited,  brings 
into  play  his  higher  gifts  and  excludes  his  lower. 
Under  slight  obligation  to  imagine,  he  runs  slight  risk 
of  succumbing  to  those  conventionalisms  which  often 
stiffen  his  work  when  he  trusts  to  his  imagination. 
Avowedly  dealing  with  his  own  opinions  and  experi- 
ences, he  is  not  tempted  to  project  them,  as  in  the 
novels  he  does  somewhat  too  frequently,  into  the  ca- 
reers of  his  heroes.  Dealing  chiefly  with  action  not 
with  thought,  he  does  not  tend  so  much  as  elsewhere  to 
solve  speculative  problems  with  sentiment  instead  of 
with  reflection.  In  the  Son  and  the  Daughter  he  has 


ARGUMENT  47 

the  fullest  chance  to  be  autobiographic  without  dis- 
guise. 

Here  lies  his  best  province  and  here  appears  his  best 
art.  It  is  an  art,  as  he  employs  it,  no  less  subtle  than 
humane.  Warm,  firm  flesh  covers  the  bones  of  his 
chronology.  He  imparts  reality  to  this  or  that  occa- 
sion, like  a  novelist,  by  reciting  conversation  which 
must  come  from  something  besides  bare  memory.  He 
rounds  out  the  characters  of  the  persons  he  remem- 
bers with  a  fulness  and  grace  which,  lifelike  as  his  per- 
sons are,  betray  the  habit  of  creating  characters.  He 
enriches  his  analysis  of  the  Middle  Border  with  sensi- 
tive descriptions  of  the  "large,  unconscious  scenery" 
in  which  it  transacted  its  affairs.  If  it  is  difficult  to 
overprize  the  documentary  value  of  his  saga  of  the 
Garlands  and  the  McClintocks  and  of  their  son  who 
turned  back  on  the  trail,  so  is  it  difficult  to  overpraise 
the  sincerity  and  tenderness  and  beauty  with  which  the 
chronicle  was  set  down. 

2.     WINSTON  CHURCHELI, 

The  tidal  wave  of  historical  romance  which  toward 
the  end  of  the  past  century  attacked  this  coast  and 
broke  so  far  inland  as  to  inundate  the  entire  continent 
swept  Winston  Churchill  to  a  substantial  peak  of 
popularity  to  which  he  has  since  clung,  with  little 
apparent  loss,  by  the  exercise  of  methods  somewhat 
but  not  greatly  less  romantic  than  those  which  first 
lifted  him  above  the  flood.  He  came  during  a  moment 


48   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

of  national  expansiveness.  Patriotism  and  jingoism, 
altruism  and  imperialism,  passion  and  sentimentalism 
shook  the  temper  which  had  been  slowly  stiffening  since 
the  Civil  War.  Now,  with  a  rush  of  unaccustomed 
emotions,  the  national  imagination  sought  out  its  own 
past,  luxuriating  in  it,  not  to  say  wallowing  in  it. 

In  Mr.  Churchill  it  found  a  romancer  full  of  con- 
solation to  any  who  might  fear  or  suspect  that  the 
country's  history  did  not  quite  match  its  destiny. 
He  had  enough  erudition  to  lend  a  very  considerable 
"thickness"  to  his  scene,  whether  it  was  Annapolis  or 
St.  Louis  or  Kentucky  or  upland  New  England.  He 
had  a  sense  for  the  general  bearings  of  this  or  that 
epoch;  he  had  a  firm,  warm  confidence  in  the  future 
implied  and  adumbrated  by  this  past ;  he  had  a  feeling 
for  the  ceremonial  in  all  eminent  occasions.  He  had, 
too,  a  knack  at  archaic  costume  and  knack  enough  at 
the  idiom  in  which  his  contemporaries  believed  their 
forebears  had  expressed  themselves.  And  he  had,  be- 
sides all  these  qualities  needed  to  make  his  records 
heroic,  the  quality  of  moral  earnestness  which  imparted 
to  them  the  look  of  moral  significance.  Richard  Carvel 
by  the  exercise  of  simple  Maryland  virtues  rises  above 
the  enervate  young  sparks  of  Mayfair;  Stephen  Brice 
in  The  Crisis  by  his  simple  Yankee  virtues  makes  his 
mark  among  the  St.  Louis  rebels — who,  however,  are 
gallant  and  noble  though  misguided  men ;  canny  David 
Ritchie  in  The  Crossing  leads  the  frontiersmen  of 
Kentucky  as  the  little  child  of  fable  leads  the  lion  and 
the  lamb;  crafty  Jethro  Bass  in  Collision,  though  a 


ARGUMENT  49 

village  boss  with  a  pocketful  of  mortgages  and  conse- 
quently of  constituents,  surrenders  his  ugly  power  at 
the  touch  of  a  maiden's  hand. 

To  reflect  a  little  upon  this  combination  of  heroic 
color  and  moral  earnestness  is  to  discover  how  nuch 
Mr.  Churchill  owes  to  the  elements  injected  nto 
American  life  by  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Is  not  'A  'ie 
Crossing  —  to  take  specific  illustrations  —  connected 
with  the  same  central  cycle  as  The  Winning  of  the 
West?  Is  not  Coniston,  whatever  the  date  of  its 
events,  an  arraignment  of  that  civic  corruption  which 
Roosevelt  hated  as  the  natural  result  of  civic  negli- 
gence and  against  which  he  urged  the  duty  of  an 
awakened  civic  conscience?  In  time  Mr.  Churchill  was 
to  extend  his  inquiries  to  regions  of  speculation  into 
which  Roosevelt  never  ventured,  but  as  regards  Ameri- 
can history  and  American  politics  they  were  of  one 
mind.  "Nor  are  the  ethics  of  the  manner  of  our  acqui- 
sition of  a  part  of  Panama  and  the  Canal,"  wrote 
Mr.  Churchill  in  1918  in  his  essay  on  The  American 
Contribution  and  the  Democratic  Idea,  "wholly  defen- 
sible from  the  point  of  view  of  international  democracy. 
Yet  it  must  be  remembered  that  President  Roosevelt 
was  dealing  with  a  corrupt,  irresponsible,  and  hostile 
government,  and  that  the  Canal  had  become  a  neces- 
sity not  only  for  our  own  development,  but  for  that  of 
the  civilization  of  the  world."  And  again:  "The  only 
real  peril  confronting  democracy  is  the  arrest  of 
growth." 

Roosevelt  himself  could  not  have  muddled  an  issue 


50   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

better.  Like  him  Mr.  Churchill  has  habitually  moved 
along  the  main  lines  of  national  feeling — believing  in 
America  and  democracy  with  a  fealty  unshaken  by  any 
adverse  evidence  and  delighting  in  the  American  pa- 
geant with  a  gusto  rarely  modified  by  the  exercise  of 
any  critical  intelligence.  Morally  he  has  been  strenu- 
ous and  eager;  intellectually  he  has  been  naive  and 
belated.  Whether  he  has  been  writing  what  was 
avowedly  romance  or  what  was  intended  to  be  sober 
criticism  he  has  been  always  the  romancer  first  and 
the  critic  afterwards. 

And  yet  since  the  vogue  of  historical  romance  passed 
nearly  a  score  of  years  ago  Mr.  Churchill  has  honestly 
striven  to  keep  up  with  the  world  by  thinking  about  it. 
One  novel  after  another  has  presented  some  encroach- 
ing problem  of  American  civic  or  social  life:  the  con- 
trol of  politics  by  interest  in  Mr.  Crewe's  Career; 
divorce  in  A  Modern  Chronicle;  the  conflict  between 
Christianity  and  business  in  The  Inside  of  the  Cup; 
the  oppression  of  the  soul  by  the  lust  for  temporal 
power  in  A  Far  Country;  the  struggle  of  women  with 
the  conditions  of  modern  industry  in  The  Dwellmg- 
Place  of  Light.  Nothing  has  hurried  Mr.  Churchill 
or  forced  his  hand ;  he  has  taken  two  or  three  years  for 
each  novel,  has  read  widely,  has  brooded  over  his 
theme,  has  reinforced  his  stories  with  solid  documen- 
tation. He  has  aroused  prodigious  discussion  of  his 
challenges  and  solutions — particularly  in  the  case  of 
The  Inside  of  the  Cup.  That  novel  perhaps  best  of  all 
exhibits  his  later  methods.  John  Hodder  by  some 


ARGUMENT  51 

miracle  of  inattention  or  some  accident  of  isolation  has 
been  kept  in  his  country  parish  from  any  contact  with 
the  doubt  which  characterizes  his  age.  Transferred  to 
a  large  city  he  almost  instantly  finds  in  himself  here- 
sies hitherto  only  latent,  spends  a  single  summer  among 
the  poor,  and  in  the  fall  begins  relentless  war  against 
the  unworthy  rich  among  his  congregation.  Thought 
plays  but  a  trivial  part  in  Hodder's  evolution.  Had 
he  done  any  real  thinking  or  were  he  capable  of  it  he 
must  long  before  have  freed  himself  from  the  dogmas 
that  obstruct  him.  Instead  he  has  drifted  with  the 
general  stream  and  learns  not  from  the  leaders  but 
from  the  slower  followers  of  opinion.  Like  the  poli- 
tician he  absorbs  through  his  skin,  gathering  premoni- 
tions as  to  which  way  the  crowd  is  going  and  then 
rushing  off  in  that  direction. 

If  this  recalls  the  processes  of  Roosevelt,  hardly 
less  does  it  recall  those  of  Mr.  Churchill.  Once  taken 
by  an  idea  for  a  novel  he  has  always  burned  with  it 
as  if  it  were  as  new  to  the  world  as  to  him.  Here  lies, 
without  much  question,  the  secret  of  that  genuine 
earnestness  which  pervades  all  his  books :  he  writes  out 
of  the  contagious  passion  of  a  recent  convert  or  a 
still  excited  discoverer.  Here  lies,  too,  without  much 
question,  the  secret  of  Mr.  Churchill's  success  in  hold- 
ing his  audiences:  a  sort  of  unconscious  politician 
among  novelists,  he  gathers  his  premonitions  at  happy 
moments,  when  the  drift  is  already  setting  in.  Never 
once  has  Mr.  Churchill,  like  a  philosopher  or  a  seer, 
run  off  alone. 


52   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Even  for  those,  however,  who  perceive  that  he  be- 
longs intellectually  to  a  middle  class  which  is  neither 
very  subtle  nor  very  profound  on  the  one  hand  nor 
very  shrewd  or  very  downright  on  the  other,  it  is  im- 
possible to  withhold  from  Mr.  Churchill  the  respect 
due  a  sincere,  scrupulous,  and  upright  man  who  has 
served  the  truth  and  his  art  according  to  his  lights. 
If  he  has  not  overheard  the  keenest  voices  of  his  age, 
neither  has  he  listened  to  the  voice  of  the  mob.  The 
sounds  which  have  reached  him  from  among  the  people 
have  come  from  those  who  eagerly  aspire  to  better 
things  arrived  at  by  orderly  progress,  from  those  who 
desire  in  some  lawful  way  to  outgrow  the  injustices 
and  inequalities  of  civil  existence  and  by  fit  methods 
to  free  the  human  spirit  from  all  that  clogs  and  stifles 
it.  But  as  they  aspire  and  intend  better  than  they 
think,  so,  in  concert  with  them,  does  Mr.  Churchill. 

In  all  his  novels,  even  the  most  romantic,  the  real 
interest  lies  in  some  mounting  aspiration  opposed  to  a 
static  regime,  whether  the  passion  for  independence 
among  the  American  colonies,  or  the  expanding  move- 
ment of  the  population  westward,  or  the  crusades 
against  slavery  or  political  malfeasance,  or  the  extri- 
cation of  liberal  temperaments  from  the  shackles  of 
excessive  wealth  or  poverty  or  orthodoxy.  Yet  the 
only  conclusions  he  can  at  all  devise  are  those  which 
history  has  devised  already — the  achievement  of  inde- 
pendence or  of  the  Illinois  country,  the  abolition  of 
slavery,  the  defeat  of  this  or  that  usurper  of  power  in 
politics.  Rarely  is  anything  really  thought  out. 


ARGUMENT  53 

Compare,  for  instance,  his  epic  of  matrimony,  A  Mod- 
ern Chronicle,  with  such  a  penetrating — if  satirical — 
study  as  The  Custom  of  the  Country.  Mrs.  Wharton 
urges  no  more  doctrine  than  Mr.  Churchill,  and  she, 
like  him,  confines  herself  to  the  career  of  one  woman 
with  her  successive  husbands ;  but  whereas  the  Custom 
is  luminous  with  quiet  suggestion  and  implicit  com- 
mentary upon  the  relations  of  the  sexes  in  the  pre- 
vailing modes  of  marriage,  the  Chronicle  has  little  more 
to  say  than  that  after  two  exciting  marriages  a  woman 
is  ready  enough  to  settle  peacefully  down  with  the 
friend  of  her  childhood  whom  she  should  have  married 
in  the  beginning.  In  A  Far  Country  a  lawyer  who  has 
let  himself  be  made  a  tool  in  the  hands  of  nefarious 
corporations  undergoes  a  tragic  love  affair,  suffers 
conversion,  reads  a  few  books  of  modern  speculation, 
and  resolutely  turns  his  face  toward  a  new  order.  In 
the  same  precipitate  fashion  the  heroine  of  The  DweU- 
ing-Place  of  Light,  who  has  given  no  apparent  thought 
whatever  to  economic  problems  except  as  they  touch 
her  individually,  suffers  a  shock  in  connection  with  her 
intrigue  with  her  capitalist  employer  and  becomes 
straightway  a  radical,  shortly  thereafter  making  a 
pathetic  and  edifying  end  in  childbirth.  In  these 
books  there  are  hundreds  of  sound  observations  and 
elevated  sentiments ;  the  author's  sympathies  are,  as 
a  rule,  remarkably  right;  but  taken  as  a  whole  his 
most  serious  novels,  however  lifelike  and  well  rounded 
their  surfaces  may  seem,  lack  the  upholding,  articulat- 
ing skeleton  of  thought. 


54    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Much  the  same  lack  of  spiritual  penetration  and 
intellectual  consistency  which  has  kept  Mr.  Churchill 
from  ever  building  a  very  notable  realistic  plot  has 
kept  him  from  ever  creating  any  very  memorable  char- 
acters. The  author  of  ten  novels,  immensely  popular 
for  more  than  a  score  of  years,  he  has  to  his  credit  not 
a  single  figure — man  or  woman — generally  accepted 
by  the  public  as  either  a  type  or  a  person.  With  re- 
markably few  exceptions  he  has  seen  his  dramatis  per- 
sonae  from  without  and — doubtless  for  that  reason — 
has  apparently  felt  as  free  to  saw  and  fit  them  to  his 
argument  as  he  has  felt  with  his  plots.  Something  pre- 
posterous in  the  millionaire  reformer  Mr.  Crewe,  some- 
thing cantankerous  and  passionate  in  the  Abolitionist 
Judge  Whipple  of  The  Crisis,  above  all  something  both 
tough  and  quaint  in  the  up-country  politician  Jethro 
Bass  in  Coniston  resisted  the  argumentative  knife  and 
saved  for  those  particular  persons  that  look  of  being 
entities  in  their  own  right  which  distinguishes  the  au- 
thentic from  the  artificial  characters  of  fiction. 

For  the  most  part,  however,  Mr.  Churchill  has  erred 
in  what  may  be  called  the  arithmetic  of  his  art:  he 
has  thought  of  men  and  women  as  mere  fractions  of 
a  unit  of  fiction,  whereas  they  themselves  in  any  but 
romances  must  be  the  units  and  the  total  work  the 
sum  or  product  of  the  fictive  operation.  Naturally  he 
has  succeeded  rather  worse  with  characters  of  his  own 
creating,  since  his  conceptions  in  such  cases  have  come 
to  him  as  social  or  political  problems  to  be  illustrated 
in  the  conduct  of  beings  suitably  shaped,  than  in  char- 


ARGUMENT  55 

acters  drawn  in  some  measure  from  history,  with  their 
individualities  already  more  or  less  established.  With- 
out achieving  fresh  or  bold  interpretations  of  John 
Paul  Jones  or  George  Rogers  Clark  or  Lincoln,  Mr. 
Churchill  has  added  a  good  deal  to  the  vividness  of 
their  legends;  whereas  in  the  case  of  characters  not 
quite  so  historical,  such  as  Judge  Whipple  and  Jethro 
Bass,  he  has  admirably  fused  his  moral  earnestness  re- 
garding American  politics  with  his  sense  of  spacious- 
ness and  color  in  the  American  past. 

After  the  most  careful  reflection  upon  Mr. 
Churchill's  successive  studies  of  contemporary  life 
one  recurs  irresistibly  to  his  romances.  He  possesses, 
and  has  more  than  once  displayed,  a  true  romantic — 
almost  a  true  epic — instinct.  Behind  the  careers  of 
Richard  Carvel  and  Stephen  Brice  and  David  Ritchie 
and  Jethro  Bass  appear  the  procession  and  reverbera- 
tion of  stirring  days.  Nearer  a  Walter  Scott  than  a 
Bernard  Shaw,  Mr.  Churchill  has  always  been  willing 
to  take  the  memories  of  his  nation  as  they  have  come 
down  to  him  and  to  work  them  without  question  or 
rejection  into  his  broad  tapestry.  A  naturalistic 
generation  is  tempted  to  make  light  of  such  methods ; 
they  belong,  however,  too  truly  to  good  traditions  of 
literature  to  be  overlooked. 

A  national  past  has  many  uses,  and  different  dis- 
positions find  in  it  instruction  or  warning,  depression 
or  exaltation.  Mr.  Churchill  has  found  in  the  Ameri- 
can past  a  cause  for  exaltation  chiefly ;  after  his  ugliest 
chapters  the  light  breaks  and  he  closes  always  upon  the 


56   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

note  of  high  confidence  which  resounds  in  the  epics  of 
robust,  successful  nations.  If  in  this  respect  he  has 
too  regularly  flattered  his  countrymen,  he  has  also 
enriched  the  national  consciousness  by  the  colors  which 
he  has  brought  back  from  his  impassioned  forays. 
Only  now  and  then,  it  must  be  remembered,  do  histori- 
cal novels  pass  in  their  original  form  from  one  genera- 
tion to  another;  more  frequently  they  suffer  a  decom- 
position due  to  their  lack  of  essential  truth  and  descend 
to  the  function  of  compost  for  succeeding  harvests  of 
romance.  Though  probably  but  one  or  two  of  Mr. 
Churchill's  books — perhaps  not  even  one — can  be  ex- 
pected to  outlast  a  generation  with  much  vitality,  he 
cannot  be  denied  the  honor  of  having  added  something 
agreeable  if  imponderable  to  the  national  memory  and 
so  of  having  served  his  country  in  one  real  way  if  not 
in  another. 

3.     ROBERT  HERRICK 

If  the  novels  of  Robert  Herrick  were  nothing  else 
they  would  still  be  indispensable  documents  upon  that 
first  and  second  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  in 
America,  when  a  minority  unconvinced  by  either 
romance  or  Roosevelt  set  out  to  scrutinize  the  exuber- 
ant complacence  which  was  becoming  a  more  and  more 
ominous  element  in  the  national  character.  Imperial- 
ism, running  a  cheerful  career  in  the  Caribbean  and 
in  the  Pacific,  had  set  the  mode  for  average  opinion; 
the  world  to  Americans  looked  immense  and  the  United 
States  the  most  immense  potentiality  in  it. 


ARGUMENT  57 

Small  wonder  then  that  the  prevailing  literature 
gave  itself  generally  to  large  proclamations  about  the 
future  or  to  spacious  recollections  of  the  past  in  which 
the  note  was  hope  unmodified.  Small  wonder  either — 
be  it  said  to  the  credit  of  literature — that  the  same 
period  caused  and  saw  the  development  of  the  most 
emphatic  protest  which  has  come  from  native  pens 
since  the  abolition  of  slavery — not  excepting  even  the 
literary  rebels  of  the  eighties.  Much  of  that  protest 
naturally  expressed  itself  in  fiction,  of  many  orders 
of  intelligence  and  competence  and  intention.  Various 
voices  have  been  louder  or  shriller  or  sweeter  or  in 
some  cases  more  thoroughgoing  than  Mr.  Herrick's; 
but  his  is  the  voice  which,  in  fiction,  has  best  repre- 
sented the  scholar's  conscience  disturbed  by  the  spec- 
tacle of  a  tumultuous  generation  of  which  most  of  the 
members  are  too  much  undisturbed. 

In  particular  Mr.  Herrick  has  concerned  himself 
with  the  status  of  women  in  the  republic  which  has 
prided  itself  upon  nothing  more  than  upon  its  attitude 
toward  their  sex,  and  he  has  regularly  insisted  upon 
carrying  his  researches  beyond  that  period  of  green 
girlhood  which  appears  to  be  all  of  a  woman's  life 
that  can  interest  the  popular  fiction-mongers.  He 
knows,  without  anywhere  putting  it  precisely  into 
words,  that  the  elaborate  language  of  compliment  used 
by  Americans  toward  women,  though  deriving  perhaps 
from  a  time  when  women  were  less  numerous  on  the 
frontier  than  men  and  were  therefore  specially  prized 
and  praised,  has  become  for  the  most  part  a  hollow 


58  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

language.  The  pioneer  woman  earned  all  the  respect 
she  got  by  the  equal  share  she  bore  in  the  tasks  of  her 
laborious  world.  Her  successor  in  the  comfortable 
society  which  the  frontier  founded  by  its  travail  neither 
works  nor  breeds  as  those  first  women  did.  But  the 
energy  thus  happily  released,  instead  of  being  directed 
into  other  useful  channels,  has  been  encouraged  to 
spend  itself  upon  the  complex  arts  of  the  parasite. 

Ascribe  it  to  the  vanity  of  men  who  choose  to  regard 
women  as  luxurious  chattels  and  the  visible  symptoms 
of  success;  ascribe  it  to  a  wasteful  habit  practised  by 
a  nation  never  compelled  to  make  the  best  use  of  its 
resources ;  ascribe  it  to  the  craft  of  a  sex  quick  to 
seize  its  advantage  after  centuries  of  disadvantage — 
ascribe  it  to  whatever  one  will,  the  fact  remains  that 
the  United  States  has  evolved  a  widely  admired  type 
of  woman  who  lacks  the  glad  animal  spontaneity  of 
the  little  girl,  the  ardent  abandon  of  the  mistress,  the 
strong  loyalty  of  the  wife,  the  deep,  calm,  fierce  in- 
stincts of  the  mother;  and  who  even  lacks — although 
here  a  change  has  taken  place  since  Mr.  Herrick  began 
to  chronicle  her — the  confident  impulse  to  follow  her 
own  path  as  an  individual,  irrespective  of  her  peculiar 
functions.  It  must  be  remembered,  of  course,  that 
Mr.  Herrick  has  had  in  mind  not  the  vast  majority  of 
women,  who  in  the  United  States  as  everywhere  else  on 
earth  still  fully  participate  in  life,  but  the  American 
Woman,  that  traditional  figure  compounded  of  timid 
ice  and  dainty  insolence  and  habitually  tricked  out 
with  a  wealth  which  holds  the  world  so  far  away  that 


ARGUMENT  59 

it  cannot  see  how  empty  she  really  is.  He  has  sought 
in  his  novels,  by  dissecting  the  pretty  simulacrum,  to 
show  that  it  has  little  blood  and  less  soul. 

At  times  he  writes  with  a  biting  animus.  In  One 
Woman's  Life  Milly  schemes  herself  out  of  the  plain 
surroundings  into  which  she  was  born,  lapses  from  her 
designs  enough  to  marry  a  poor  man  for  love  but  sub- 
sequently wrecks  his  career  and  wears  him  out  by  her 
ambitious  ignorance,  and  before  she  ends  the  story  in 
the  arms  of  another  husband  has  contrived  to  waste 
the  savings  of  a  friend  of  her  own  sex  who  tries  to 
help  her.  In  The  Healer  the  doctor's  wife  continually 
drags  him  back  from  the  passionate  exercise  of  his 
true  gift,  luring  him  with  her  beauty  to  live  in  the  world 
which  nearly  destroys  him,  though  he  finally  compre- 
hends the  danger  and  escapes  her.  And  in  Together, 
its  epic  canvas  crowded  with  all  kinds  and  conditions 
of  lovers  and  married  couples,  Mr.  Herrick  never 
spares  the  type.  Other  novelists  may  be  content  to 
show  her  glittering  in  her  maiden  plumage ;  he  advances 
to  the  point  where  it  becomes  clear  that  the  qualities 
ordinarily  exalted  in  her  are  nothing  but  signs  of  an 
arrested  spiritual  and  moral  development.  Hard  and 
wilful  enough,  she  never  becomes  mature,  and  she  tan- 
gles the  web  of  life  with  the  heedless  hands  of  a  child. 

A  less  reflective  novelist  might  be  content  with  blam- 
ing or  satirizing  her  for  her  blind  instinct  to  marry 
her  richest  suitor;  for  forcing  him,  once  married,  to 
support  her  and  her  children  at  a  pitch  of  luxury  which 
demands  that  he  give  up  his  personal  aspirations  in  art 


60  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

or  science  or  altruism;  for  struggling  so  ruthlessly  to 
plant  her  daughters  in  prosperous  soil  which  will  nour- 
ish the  "sacred  seed"  of  the  race  abundantly.  Mr. 
Herrick,  however,  does  not  disapprove  such  instincts 
for  their  own  sake.  He  sees  in  them  an  element  fur- 
nishing mankind  with  one  of  its  valuable  sources  of 
stability.  What  he  assails  is  a  national  conception 
which  endows  women  with  these  instincts  in  mean, 
trivial,  unenlightened  forms. 

His  criticism  of  the  American  Woman,  indeed,  is 
but  an  emphatic  point  in  his  larger  criticism  of  human 
life,  and  he  has  singled  her  out  essentially,  it  seems, 
because  of  the  shallowness  of  her  lovely  pretenses.  It 
is  the  shallowness,  not  the  sex,  which  arouses  him.  In 
The  Common  Lot,  in  The  Memoirs  of  an  American 
Citizen,  in  Clark's  Field,  and  in  certain  of  the  strands 
of  Together  it  is  the  women  who  demand  that,  no  mat- 
ter what  happens,  they  shall  be  allowed  to  live  their 
lives  upon  the  high  plane  of  integrity  from  which  the 
casual  world  is  always  trying  to  pull  men  and  women 
down.  Integrity  in  love,  integrity  in  personal  conduct, 
integrity  in  business  and  public  affairs — this  Mr. 
Herrick  holds  to  with  a  profound,  at  times  a  bleak, 
consistency  which  has  both  worried  and  limited  his 
readers.  Integrity  in  love  leads  Margaret  Pole  in 
Together,  for  instance,  from  her  foolish  husband  to 
her  lover  during  one  lyric  episode  and  thereafter  holds 
them  apart  in  the  consciousness  of  a  love  completed 
and  not  to  be  touched  with  perishable  flesh.  In  novel 
after  novel  the  characters  come  to  grief  from  the 


ARGUMENT  61 

American  habit  of  extravagance,  which,  as  Mr. 
Herrick  represents  it,  seems  a  serious  offense  against 
integrity — springing  from  a  failure  to  control  vagrant 
desires  and  tying  the  spirit  to  the  need  of  superfluous 
things  until  it  ceases  to  be  itself.  And  with  never 
wearied  iteration  he  comes  back  to  the  problem  of  how 
the  individual  can  maintain  his  integrity  in  the  face 
of  the  temptation  to  get  easy  wealth  and  cut  a  false 
figure  in  the  world. 

Possibly  it  was  a  youth  spent  in  New  England  that 
made  Mr.  Herrick  as  sensitive  as  he  has  been  to  the 
atmosphere  of  affairs  in  Chicago,  where  fortunes  have 
come  in  like  a  flood  during  his  residence  there,  and 
where  the  popular  imagination  has  been  primarily 
enlisted  in  the  game  of  seeing  where  the  next  wave 
will  break  and  of  catching  its  golden  spoil.  Mr. 
Herrick  has  not  confined  himself  to  Chicago  for  his 
scene ;  indeed,  he  is  one  of  the  least  local  of  American 
novelists,  ranging  as  he  does,  with  all  the  appearances 
of  ease,  from  New  England  to  California,  from  farm 
to  factory,  from  city  to  suburb,  and  along  the  routes 
of  pleasure  which  Americans  take  in  Europe.  But 
Chicago  is  the  true  center  of  his  universe,  and  he  is 
the  principal  historian  in  fiction  of  that  roaring  village 
so  rapidly  turned  town.  He  has  not,  however,  been 
blown  with  the  prevailing  winds.  The  vision  that  has 
fired  most  of  his  fellow  citizens  has  looked  to  him 
like  a  tantalizing  but  insubstantial  mirage.  Something 
in  his  disposition  has  kept  him  cool  while  others  were 
being  made  drunk  with  opportunity. 


62   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Is  it  the  scholar  in  him,  or  the  New  Englander,  or 
the  moralist  which  has  compelled  him  to  count  the 
moral  cost  of  material  expansion?  In  the  first  of  his 
novels  to  win  much  of  a  hearing,  The  Common  Lot,  he 
studies  the  career  of  an  architect  who  becomes  involved 
in  the  frauds  of  dishonest  builders  and  sacrifices  his 
professional  integrity  for  the  sake  of  quick,  dangerous 
profits.  The  Memoirs  of  an  American  Citizen,  a 
precious  document  now  too  much  neglected,  follows  a 
country  youth  of  good  initial  impulses  through  his 
rise  and  progress  among  the  packers  and  on  to  the 
Senate  of  the  United  States.  This  is  one  of  the  oldest 
themes  in  literature,  one  of  the  themes  most  certain 
to  succeed  with  any  public:  Dick  Whittington,  the 
Industrious  Apprentice,  over  again.  Mr.  Herrick, 
however,  cannot  merely  repeat  the  old  drama  or  point 
the  old  moral.  His  hero  wriggles  upward  by  devious 
ways  and  sharp  practices,  crushing  competitors,  di- 
verting justice,  and  gradually  paying  for  his  fortune 
with  his  integrity.  In  the  most  modern  idiom  Mr. 
Herrick  asks  again  and  again  the  ancient  question 
whether  the  whole  world  is  worth  as  much  as  a  man's 
soul. 

That  mystical  rigor  which  permits  but  one  answer  to 
the  question  suggests  to  Mr.  Herrick  two  avenues  of 
cure  from  the  evils  accompanying  the  disease  he  broods 
upon.  One  is  a  return  to  simple  living  under  conditions 
which  quiet  the  restless  nerves,  allay  the  greedy  appe- 
tites, and  restore  the  central  will.  The  Master  in  The 
Master  of  the  Inn,  Renault  in  Together,  Holden  in 


ARGUMENT  63 

The  Healer — all  of  them  utter  and  live  a  gospel  of 
health  which  obviously  corresponds  to  Mr.  Herrick's 
belief.  When  the  world  grows  too  loud  one  may  with- 
draw from  it;  there  are  still  uncrowded  spaces  where 
existence  marches  simply.  Remembering  them,  Mr. 
Herrick's  imagination,  held  commonly  on  so  tight  a 
fist,  slips  its  hood  off  and  takes  wing.  And  yet  he 
knows  that  the  north  woods  into  which  a  few  favored 
men  and  women  may  withdraw  are  not  cure  enough  for 
the  multitude.  They  must  practise,  or  some  one  must 
practise  for  their  benefit,  honorable  refusals  in  the 
midst  of  life.  The  architect's  wife  in  The  Common  Lot, 
Harrington's  sister  in  The  Memoirs  of  an  American 
Citizen,  the  clear-eyed  Johnstons  in  Together — they 
have  or  attain  the  knowledge,  which  seems  a  paradox, 
that  selfishness  can  fatally  entangle  the  individual  in 
the  perplexities  of  existence  and  that  the  best  chance 
for  disentanglement  may  come  from  intelligent  unself- 
ishness. 

Clark's  Field  amply  illustrates  this  paradox.  The 
field  has  for  many  years  lain  idle  in  the  midst  of  a 
growing  town  because  of  a  flaw  in  the  title,  and  when 
eventually  the  title  is  quieted  and  the  land  is  sold  it 
pours  wealth  upon  heads  not  educated  to  use  it  with 
wisdom.  Here  is  unearned  increment  made  flesh  and 
converted  into  drama:  the  field  that  might  have  been 
home  and  garden  and  playground  becomes  a  machine, 
a  monster,  which  gradually  visits  evil  upon  all  con- 
cerned. Then  Adelle  and  her  proletarian  cousin,  aware 
that  the  field  through  the  corruption  of  a  well-meant 


64    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

law  has  grown  malevolent,  resolve  to  break  the  spell  by 
surrendering  their  selfish  interests  and  accepting  the 
position  of  unselfish  trustees  to  the  estate  until — if 
that  time  ever  comes — some  better  means  may  be  de- 
vised for  making  the  earth  serve  the  purposes  of  those 
who  live  upon  it. 

The  solution  does  not  entirely  satisfy,  of  course. 
At  best  it  is  a  makeshift  if  considered  in  its  larger 
bearings.  It  comes  near,  however,  to  solving  the  prob- 
lems as  individuals  of  Adelle  and  her  cousin,  who  save 
more  in  character  than  they  lose  in  pocket.  And  it 
might  possibly  have  come  nearer  still  were  it  not  for 
the  handicap  under  which  Mr.  Herrick,  for  all  his  in- 
telligence and  conscience,  has  labored  as  an  artist. 
That  handicap  is  a  certain  stiffness  on  the  plastic  side 
of  his  imagination.  His  conceptions  come  to  him,  if 
criticism  can  be  any  judge,  with  a  large  touch  of  the 
abstract  about  them;  his  rationalizing  intelligence  is 
always  present  at  their  birth.  Nor  do  his  narratives, 
once  under  way,  flow  with  the  sure,  effortless  movement 
which  is  natural  to  born  story-tellers.  His  imagina- 
tion, not  quite  continuous  enough,  occasionally  fails 
to  fuse  and  shape  disparate  materials.  It  is  likely  to 
fall  short  when  he  essays  fancy  or  mystery,  as  in 
A  Life  for  a  Life;  or  when  he  has  a  whimsy  for  amusing 
melodrama,  as  in  His  Great  Adventure.  The  flexibility 
which  reveals  itself  in  humor  or  in  the  lighter  irony  is 
not  one  of  his  principal  endowments.  Restrained  and 
direct  as  he  always  is  so  far  as  language  goes,  he  can- 
not always  keep  his  action  absolutely  in  hand:  this  or 


ARGUMENT  65 

that  person  or  incident  now  and  then  breaks  out  of 
the  pattern;  the  skeleton  of  a  formula  now  and  then 
becomes  too  prominent. 

It  is  his  intelligence  which  makes  his  satire  sharp 
and  significant ;  it  is  his  conscience  which  lends  passion 
to  his  representation  and  lifts  him  often  to  a  true  if 
sober  eloquence.  But  in  at  least  two  of  his  novels 
imagination  takes  him,  as  only  imagination  can  take 
a  novelist,  beyond  the  reach  of  either  intelligence  or 
conscience.  Together,  a  little  cumbersome,  a  little 
sprawling,  nevertheless  glows  with  an  intensity  which 
gives  off  heat  as  well  as  light.  It  is  more  than  an 
exhaustive  document  upon  modern  marriage;  it  is  in- 
terpretation as  well.  Clark's  Field,  a  sparer,  clearer 
story,  is  even  more  than  interpretation;  it  is  a  work 
of  art  springing  from  a  spirit  which  has  taken  fire 
and  has  transmuted  almost  all  its  abstract  conceptions 
into  genuine  flesh  and  blood.  That  Clark's  Field  is 
Mr.  Herrick's  latest  novel  heightens  the  expectation 
with  which  one  hears  that  after  a  silence  of  seven  years 
he  now  plans  to  return  to  fiction. 


4.     UPTON  SINCLAIR 

The  social  and  industrial  order  which  has  blacklisted 
Upton  Sinclair  has,  while  increasing  his  rage,  also 
increased  his  art.  In  his  youth  he  was  primarily  a 
lyric  boy  storming  the  ears  of  a  world  which  failed  to 
detect  in  his  romances  the  promise  of  which  he  himself 


66   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

was  outspokenly  confident.  His  first  character — the 
hero  of  Springtime  and  Harvest  and  of  The  Journal 
of  Arthur  Stirling — belonged  to  the  lamenting  race  of 
the  minor  poets,  shaped  his  beauty  in  deep  seclusion, 
and  died  because  it  went  unrecognized.  Mr.  Sinclair, 
though  he  had  created  Stirling  in  his  own  image,  did 
not  die.  Instead  he  began  to  study  the  causes  of  pub- 
lic deafness  and  found  the  injustices  which  ever  since 
he  has  devoted  his  enormous  energy  to  exposing.  If 
that  original  motive  seems  inadequate  and  if  traces 
of  it  have  been  partially  responsible  for  his  reputation 
as  a  seeker  of  personal  notoriety,  still  it  has  lent  ardor 
to  his  crusade.  And  if  he  had  not  discovered  so  much 
injustice  to  chronicle — if  there  had  not  been  so  much 
for  him  to  discover — he  must  have  lacked  the  ammu- 
nition with  which  he  has  fought. 

As  the  evidences  have  accumulated  he  has  been 
spared  the  need  of  complaining  merely  because  another 
minor  poet  was  neglected  and  has  been  able  to  widen 
his  accusations  until  they  include  the  whole  multitude 
of  oppressions  which  free  spirits  have  to  contend 
against  when  they  face  machines  and  privilege  and 
mortmain.  The  industrial  system  which  true  prophets 
have  unanimously  condemned  for  a  century  and  a  half 
helped  to  pack  Mr.  Sinclair's  records  from  the  first; 
the  war,  with  its  vast  hysteria  and  blind  panic,  made 
it  superfluous  for  him  to  add  much  commentary  in 
Jimmie  Higgms  and  100%  to  the  veritable  episodes 
which  he  there  recounted.  On  some  occasions  fact  it- 
self has  the  impetus  of  propaganda.  The  times  have 


ARGUMENT  67 

furnished  Mr.  Sinclair  the  keen,  cool,  dangerous  art  of 
Thomas  Paine. 

To  mention  Paine  is  to  rank  Mr.  Sinclair  with  the 
ragged  philosophers  among  whom  he  properly  belongs, 
rather  than  with  learned  misanthropes  like  Swift  or 
intellectual  ironists  like  Bernard  Shaw.  An  expansive 
passion  for  humanity  at  large  colors  all  this  prole- 
tarian radical  has  written.  By  disposition  very  obvi- 
ously a  poet,  working  with  no  subtle  or  complex  proc- 
esses and  without  any  of  the  lighter  aspects  of  humor, 
Mr.  Sinclair  simply  refuses  to  accept  existence  as  it 
stands  and  goes  on  questioning  it  forever.  Samuel 
the  Seeker  seems  a  kind  of  allegory  of  its  author's  own 
career.  He,  too,  in  the  fashion  of  Samuel  Prescott, 
inquires  of  all  he  meets  why  they  tolerate  injustice  and 
demands  that  something  or  other  be  done  at  once. 
These  are  the  methods  of  the  ragged  philosophers, 
whereas  the  learned  understand  that  justice  comes 
slowly  and  so  rest  now  and  then  from  effort;  and  the 
ironists  understand  that  justice  may  never  come  and 
so  now  and  then  sit  down,  detached  and  cynical. 

Naive  inquirers  like  Upton  Sinclair  take  and  give 
fewer  opportunities  for  comfort.  How  can  any  one 
talk  of  the  long  ages  of  human  progress  when  a  child 
may  starve  to  death  in  a  few  days  ?  How  can  any  one 
take  refuge  in  irony  when  agony  is  always  abroad, 
biting  and  rending?  How  can  any  one  leave  to  others 
the  obligation  to  assail  injustice  when  the  responsi- 
bility for  it  lies  equally  upon  all,  whether  victims  or 
victors,  who  permit  it  to  continue?  A  questioner  so 


68    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

relentless  can  very  soon  bore  the  questioned,  especially 
if  they  are  less  strenuous  or  less  inflamed  than  he  and 
can  keep  up  his  pitch  neither  of  activity  nor  of  anger ; 
but  this  is  no  proof  that  such  an  inquiry  is  imperti- 
nent or  that  answers  are  impossible.  Indeed,  the 
chances  are  that  the  proportions  of  this  boredom  and 
the  animosity  resulting  from  it  will  depend  upon  the 
extent  to  which  grievances  do  exist  about  which  it  is 
painful  to  think  for  the  reason  that  they  so  plainly 
should  not  exist.  A  complacent  reader  of  any  of 
Mr.  Sinclair's  better  books  can  stay  complacent  only 
by  shutting  up  the  book  and  his  mind  again. 

Without  doubt  the  various  abuses  which  these  books 
set  forth  have  their  case  seriously  weakened  by  the 
violent  quickness  with  which  Mr.  Sinclair  scents  con- 
spiracy among  the  enemies  of  justice.  It  is  perhaps 
not  to  be  wondered  at  that  he  should  so  often  fly  to 
this  conclusion ;  he  has  himself,  as  his  personal  history 
in  The  Brass  Check  makes  clear  enough,  been  practi- 
cally conspired  against.  But  some  instinct  for  melo- 
drama in  his  constitution  has  led  him  to  invent  a  larger 
number  of  conspirators  than  has  been  necessary  to 
illustrate  his  contention. 

In  Love's  Pilgrimage,  for  instance,  Thyrsis  suffers 
tortures  from  the  fact  that  it  takes  time  for  a  poet, 
however  gifted,  to  make  himself  heard.  In  reality,  of 
course,  the  blame  for  this  lies  in  about  the  same  quar- 
ter of  the  universe  as  that  which  establishes  a  period 
of  years  between  youth  and  maturity ;  to  complain  too 
bitterly  about  either  ruling  is  to  waste  on  an  inscru- 


ARGUMENT  69 

table  problem  the  strength  which  might  better  be  de- 
voted to  an  annoying  task.  Mr.  Sinclair,  however, 
cools  himself  in  no  such  philosophy.  He  dramatizes 
Thyrsis's  hungry  longings  and  cruel  disappointments 
on  Thyrsis's  own  terms,  making  the  boy  out  a  martyr 
with  powerful  forces  arrayed  against  him  in  a  con- 
spiracy to  keep  ascendant  genius  down.  Consequently 
the  narrative  has  about  it  something  shrill  and  febrile ; 
it  is  keyed  too  high  to  carry  full  conviction  to  any  but 
those  who  are  straining  at  a  similar  leash.  So  also 
in  The  Profits  of  Religion — which  is  to  the  present  age 
what  The  Age  of  Reason  was  to  an  earlier  revolution- 
ary generation — Mr.  Sinclair  excessively  simplifies 
religious  history  by  reducing  almost  the  whole  process 
to  a  conspiracy  on  the  part  of  priestcraft  to  hoodwink 
the  people  and  so  to  fatten  its  own  greedy  purse. 
He  must  know  that  the  process  has  not  been  quite  so 
simple;  but,  leaving  to  others  to  say  the  things  that 
all  will  say,  he  studies  "supernaturalism  as  a  source 
of  income  and  a  shield  to  privilege.'*  Here  again  his 
instincts  and  methods  as  a  melodramatist  assert  them- 
selves :  he  warms  to  the  struggle  and  plays  his  lash  upon 
his  conspiring  priests  in  a  mood  of  mingled  duty  and 
delight. 

The  Profits  of  Religion  and  The  Brass  Check  belong 
to  a  series  of  treatises  on  the  economic  interpretation 
of  culture  which  will  later  examine  education  and  litera- 
ture as  these  two  have  examined  the  church  and  jour- 
nalism and  which  collectively  will  bear  the  title  The 
Dead  Hand.  Against  the  malign  domination  of  the 


70    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

present  by  the  past  Mr.  Sinclair  directs  his  principal 
assault.  In  the  arts  he  sees  the  dead  hand  holding 
the  classics  on  their  thrones  and  thrusting  back  new 
masterpieces  as  they  appear;  in  religion  he  sees  it 
clothing  the  visions  of  ancient  poets  in  steel  creeds  and 
rituals  and  denying  that  such  visions  can  ever  come  to 
later  spirits ;  in  human  society  he  sees  it  welding  the 
manacles  of  caste  and  hardening  this  or  that  tempo- 
rary pattern  of  life  to  a  perpetual  order.  As  he  re- 
peatedly suspects  conspiracy  where  none  exists,  so  he 
repeatedly  suspects  deliberate  malice  where  he  should 
perceive  stupidity. 

Now  stupidity,  though  certainly  the  cause  of  more 
evils  than  malice  can  devise,  is  less  employable  as  a 
villain:  it  is  not  anthropomorphic  enough  for  melo- 
drama. Mr.  Sinclair  is  moral  first  and  then  intellectual. 
Touching  upon  such  a  theme  as  the  horrors  of  venereal 
disease  he  feels  more  than  a  rational  man's  contempt 
for  the  imbecility  of  parents  who  will  not  instruct  their 
daughters  in  anything  but  the  sentimental  elements  of 
sex;  he  feels  the  fury  toward  them  that  audiences  feel 
toward  villains.  It  is  much  the  same  with  his  rather 
absurd  novels  written  to  display  the  follies  of  fashion- 
able life,  The  Metropolis  and  The  Moneychangers:  he 
finds  more  crime  than  folly  in  the  extravagant  pursuit 
of  pleasure  on  the  part  of  the  few  while  the  many 
endure  hunger  and  cold,  homelessness  and  joblessness, 
ignorance  and  rebellion  and  premature  decay.  Though 
the  satirists  may  smile  at  the  silly  few,  the  ragged 
philosophers  must  weep  for  the  miserable  many. 


ARGUMENT  71 

Class-consciousness  is  a  great  advantage  to  the 
writer  of  exciting  fiction,  as  numerous  American  novel- 
ists have  shown — standing  ordinarily,  however,  on  the 
side  of  the  privileged  orders.  Mr.  Sinclair  in  The 
Jungle,  his  great  success,  taking  his  stand  with  the 
unprivileged,  with  the  wretched  aliens  in  the  Chicago 
stockyards,  had  the  advantage  that  he  could  represent 
his  characters  as  actually  contending  against  the  con- 
spiracy which  always  exists  when  the  exploiters  of 
men  see  the  exploited  growing  restless.  What  out- 
raged the  public  was  the  news,  later  confirmed  by  offi- 
cial investigation,  that  the  meat  of  a  large  part  of  the 
world  was  being  prepared,  at  great  profit  to  the  pack- 
ers, under  conditions  abominably  unhygienic ;  what  out- 
raged Mr.  Sinclair  was  the  spectacle  of  the  lives  which 
the  workers  in  the  yards  were  compelled  to  lead  if  they 
got  work — which  meant  life  to  them — at  all.  Thanks 
to  the  conspiracy  among  their  masters  they  could  not 
help  themselves ;  thanks  to  the  weight  of  the  dead  hand 
they  could  get  no  help  from  popular  opinion,  which 
saw  their  plight  as  something  essential  to  the  very 
structure  of  society,  as  Aristotle  saw  slavery.  Mr. 
Sinclair  proclaimed  with  a  ringing  voice  that  their 
plight  was  not  essential;  and  he  prophesied  the  revolu- 
tion with  an  eloquence  which,  though  the  revolution 
has  not  come,  still  warms  and  lifts  the  raw  material 
with  which  he  had  to  deal. 

Nothing  about  him  has  done  more  to  make  him  an 
arresting  novelist  than  his  conviction  that  mankind 
has  not  yet  reached  its  peak,  as  the  pessimists  think; 


72  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

and  that  the  current  stage  of  civilization,  with  all  that 
is  unendurable  about  it,  need  last  no  longer  than  till  the 
moment  when  mankind  determines  that  it  need  no 
longer  endure.  He  speaks  as  a  socialist  who  has  dug 
up  a  multitude  of  economic  facts  and  can  present  them 
with  appalling  force;  he  speaks  as  a  poet  sustained  by 
visions  and  generous  hopes. 

How  hope  has  worked  in  Mr.  Sinclair  appears  with 
significant  emphasis  in  the  contrast  between  Manassas 
and  100%;  the  two  books  illustrate  the  range  of 
American  naturalism  and  the  progressive  disillusion 
of  a  generation.  Manassas  is  the  work  of  a  man  filled 
with  epic  memories  and  epic  expectations  who  saw  in 
the  Civil  War  a  clash  of  titanic  principles,  saw  a  na- 
tion being  beaten  out  on  a  fearful  anvil,  saw  splendor 
and  heroism  rising  up  from  the  pits  of  slaughter.  And 
in  spite  of  his  fifteen  years  spent  in  discovering  the 
other  side  of  the  American  picture  Mr.  Sinclair  -in 
Jimmie  Higgins,  the  story  of  a  socialist  who  went  to 
war  against  the  Kaiser,  showed  traces  still  of  a  ro- 
mantic pulse,  settling  down,  however,  toward  the  end, 
to  a  colder  beat.  It  is  the  colder  beat  which  throbs  in 
100%,  with  a  temperature  that  suggests  both  ice  and 
fire.  Rarely  has  such  irony  been  maintained  in  an 
entire  volume  as  that  which  traces  the  evolution  of 
Peter  Gudge  from  sharper  to  patriot  through  the  foul 
career  of  spying  and  incitement  and  persecution  opened 
to  his  kind  of  talents  by  the  frenzy  of  noncombatants 
during  the  war.  To  this  has  that  patriotism  come 
which  on  the  red  fields  of  Virginia  poured  itself  out  in 


ARGUMENT  73 

unstinting  sacrifice;  and,  though  the  sacrifice  went  on 
in  France  and  Flanders,  was  it  worth  while,  Mr.  Sin- 
clair implicitly  inquires,  when  the  conflict,  at  no  matter 
how  great  a  distance,  could  breed  such  vermin  as  Peter 
Gudge?  Explicitly  he  does  not  answer  his  question: 
his  art  has  gone,  at  least  for  the  moment,  beyond 
avowed  argument,  merely  marshaling  the  evidence  with 
ironic  skill  and  dispensing  with  the  chorus.  100% 
is  a  document  which  honest  Americans  must  remember 
and  point  out  when  orators  exclaim,  in  the  accents  of 
official  idealism,  over  the  great  days  and  deeds  of  the 
great  war. 

The  road  for  Mr.  Sinclair  to  travel  is  the  road  of 
irony  and  documentation,  both  of  which  will  hold  him 
back  from  ineffectual  rages  and  thereby  serve  to  en- 
large his  influence.  Such  genius  for  controversy  as  his 
may  be  neither  expected  nor  advised  to  look  for  quieter 
paths ;  it  feels,  with  Bernard  Shaw,  that  "if  people 
are  rotting  and  starving  in  all  directions,  and  nobody 
else  has  the  heart  or  brains  to  make  a  disturbance 
about  it,  the  great  writers  must."  It  is  fair  to  say, 
however,  that  certain  readers  heartily  sympathetic 
toward  Mr.  Sinclair  observe  in  him  a  painful  tendency 
to  enjoy  scandal  for  its  own  sake  and  to  generalize 
from  it  to  an  extent  which  hurts  his  cause;  observe  in 
him  a  quite  superfluous  gusto  when  it  comes  to  report- 
ing bloody  incidents  not  always  contributory  to  any 
general  design;  observe  in  him  a  frequent  over-use  of 
the  shout  and  the  scream.  He  has  himself  given  an  ex- 
ample— 100% — on  which  such  critical  strictures  are 


74   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

•based;  in  that  best  of  his  novels  as  well  as  best  of  his 
arguments  he  has  avoided  most  of  his  own  defects. 

A  revolutionary  novelist  naturally  finds  it  difficult 
to  represent  his  world  with  the  quiet  grasp  with  which 
it  can  be  represented  by  one  who,  accepting  the  present 
frame  of  life,  has  studied  it  curiously,  affectionately, 
until  it  has  left  a  firm,  substantial  image  in  the  mind. 
The  revolutionist  must  see  life  as  constantly  whirling 
and  melting  under  his  gaze;  he  must  bring  to  light 
many  facts  which  the  majority  overlook  but  which  it 
will  seem  to  him  like  connivance  with  injustice  to  leave 
in  hiding;  he  must  go  constantly  beyond  what  is  to 
what  ought  to  be.  All  the  more  reason,  then,  why  he 
should  be  as  watchful  as  the  most  watchful  artist  in 
his  choice  and  use  of  the  modes  of  his  particular  art. 
It  requires  at  least  as  much  art  to  convert  as  to  give 
pleasure. 

5.     THEODORE  DREISER 

Much  concerned  about  wisdom  as  Theodore  Dreiser 
is,  he  almost  wholly  lacks  the  dexterous  knowingness 
which  has  marked  the  mass  of  fiction  in  the  age  of 
O.  Henry.  Not  only  has  Mr.  Dreiser  never  allowed 
any  one  else  to  make  up  his  mind  for  him  regarding  the 
significance  and  aims  and  obligations  of  mankind  but 
he  has  never  made  up  his  mind  himself.  A  large  dubi- 
tancy  colors  all  his  reflections.  "All  we  know  is  that 
we  cannot  know."  The  only  law  about  which  we  can 
be  reasonably  certain  is  the  law  of  change.  Justice  is 
"an  occasional  compromise  struck  in  an  eternal 


ARGUMENT  75 

battle."  Virtue  and  honesty  are  "a  system  of  weights 
and  measures,  balances  struck  between  man  and  man." 

Prudence  no  less  than  philosophy  demands,  then, 
that  we  hold  ourselves  constantly  in  readiness  to  dis- 
card our  ancient  creeds  and  habits  and  step  valiantly 
around  the  corner  beyond  which  reality  will  have 
drifted  even  while  we  were  building  our  houses  on  what 
seemed  the  primeval  and  eternal  rock.  Tides  of  change 
rise  from  deeps  below  deeps;  cosmic  winds  of  change 
blow  upon  us  from  boundless  chaos ;  mountains,  in  the 
long  geologic  seasons,  shift  and  flow  like  clouds ;  and 
the  everlasting  heavens  may  some  day  be  shattered  by 
the  explosion  or  pressure  of  new  circumstances. 
Somewhere  in  the  scheme  man  stands  punily  on  what 
may  be  an  Ararat  rising  out  of  the  abyss  or  only  a 
promontory  of  the  moment  sinking  back  again;  there 
all  his  strength  is  devoted  to  a  dim  struggle  for  sur- 
vival. How  in  this  flickering  universe  shall  man  claim 
for  himself  the  honors  of  any  important  antiquity  or 
any  important  destiny?  What,  in  this  vast  accident, 
does  human  dignity  amount  to? 

For  a  philosopher  with  views  so  wide  it  is  difficult 
to  be  a  dramatist  or  a  novelist.  If  he  is  consistent  the 
most  portentous  human  tragedy  must  seem  to  him  only 
a  tiny  gasp  for  breath,  the  most  delightful  human 
comedy  only  a  tiny  flutter  of  joy.  Against  a  back- 
ground of  suns  dying  on  the  other  side  of  Aldebaran 
any  mole  trodden  upon  by  some  casual  hoof  may  ap- 
pear as  significant  a  personage  as  an  CEdipus  or  a  Lear 
in  his  last  agony.  To  be  a  novelist  or  dramatist  at  all 


76   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

such  a  cosmic  philosopher  must  contract  his  vision  to 
the  little  island  we  inhabit,  must  adjust  his  interest  to 
mortal  proportions  and  concerns,  must  match  his  nar- 
rative to  the  scale  by  which  we  ordinarily  measure  our 
lives.  The  muddle  of  elements  so  often  obvious  in 
Mr.  Dreiser's  work  comes  from  the  conflict  within  him 
of  huge,  expansive  moods  and  a  conscience  working 
hard  to  be  accurate  in  its  representation  of  the  most 
honest  facts  of  manners  and  character. 

Granted,  he  might  reasonably  argue,  that  the  plight 
and  stature  of  all  mankind  are  essentially  so  mean, 
the  novelist  need  not  seriously  bother  himself  with  the 
task  of  looking  about  for  its  heroic  figures.  Plain 
•otories  of  plain  people  are  as  valuable  as  any  others. 
Since  all  larger  doctrines  and  ideals  are  likely  to  be 
false  in  a  precarious  world,  it  is  best  to  stick  as  close 
as  possible  to  the  individual.  When  the  individual  is 
sincere  he  has  at  least  some  positive  attributes;  his 
record  may  have  a  genuine  significance  for  others  if  it 
is  presented  with  absolute  candor.  Indeed,  we  can  par- 
tially escape  from  the  general  meaninglessness  of  life 
at  large  by  being  or  studying  individuals  who  are  sin- 
cere, and  who  are  therefore  the  origins  and  centers  of 
some  kind  of  reality. 

That  the  sincerity  which  Mr.  Dreiser  practises  dif- 
fers in  some  respects  from  that  of  any  other  American 
novelist,  no  matter  how  truthful,  must  be  referred  to 
one  special  quality  of  his  own  temperament.  His- 
torically he  has  his  fellows :  he  belongs  with  the  move- 
ment toward  naturalism  which  came  to  America  when 


ARGUMENT  77 

Hamlin  Garland  and  Stephen  Crane  and  Frank  Norris, 
partly  as  a  protest  against  the  bland  realism  which 
Howells  expounded,  were  dissenting  in  their  various 
dialects  from  the  reticences  and  the  romances  then  cur- 
rent. Personally  Mr.  Dreiser  displays,  almost  alone 
among  American  novelists,  the  characteristics  of  what 
for  lack  of  a  better  native  term  we  have  to  call  the 
peasant  type — the  type  to  which  Gorki  belongs  and 
which  Tolstoy  wanted  to  belong  to. 

Enlarged  by  genius  though  Mr.  Dreiser  is ;  open  as 
he  is  to  all  manner  of  novel  sensations  and  ideas ;  little 
as  he  is  bound  by  the  rigor  of  village  habits  and  preju- 
dices— still  he  carries  wherever  he  goes  the  true  peas- 
ant simplicity  of  outlook,  speaks  with  the  peasant's 
bald  frankness,  and  suffers  a  peasant  confusion  in  the 
face  of  complexity.  How  far  he  sees  life  on  one  simple 
plane  may  be  illustrated  by  his  short  story  When  the 
Old  Century  Was  New,  an  attempt  to  reconstruct  in 
fiction  the  New  York  of  1801  which  shows  him,  in  spite 
of  some  deliberate  erudition,  to  be  amazingly  unable  to 
feel  at  home  in  another  age  than  his  own.  This  same 
simplicity  of  outlook  makes  A  Traveler  at  Forty  so 
revealing  a  document,  makes  the  Traveler  appear  a 
true  Innocent  Abroad  without  the  hilarious  and  shrewd 
self-sufficiency  of  a  frontiersman  of  genius  like  Mark 
Twain.  While  it  is  true  that  Mr.  Dreiser's  plain- 
speaking  on  a  variety  of  topics  euphemized  by  earlier 
American  realists  has  about  it  some  look  of  conscious 
intention,  and  is  undoubtedly  sustained  by  his  ^  literary 
principles,  yet  his  candor  essentially  inheres  in  his 


78  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

nature:  he  thinks  in  blunt  terms  before  he  speaks  in 
them.  He  speaks  bluntly  even  upon  the  more  subtle 
and  intricate  themes — finance  and  sex  and  art — which 
interest  him  above  all  others. 

On  the  whole  he  probably  succeeds  best  with  finance. 
The  career  of  Cowperwood  in  The  Financier  and  The 
Titan,  a  career  notoriously  based  upon  that  of  Charles 
T.  Yerkes,  allowed  Mr.  Dreiser  to  exercise  his  virtue 
of  patient  industry  and  to  build  up  a  solid  monument 
of  fact  which,  though  often  dull  enough,  nevertheless 
continues  generally  to  convince,  at  least  in  respect  to 
Cowperwood's  business  enterprises.  The  American 
financier,  after  all,  has  rarely  had  much  subtlety  in 
his  make-up.  Single-minded,  tough-skinned,  ruthless, 
"suggesting  a  power  which  invents  man  for  one  purpose 
and  no  other,  as  generals,  saints,  and  the  like  are  in- 
vented," he  shoulders  and  hurls  his  bulk  through  a  sea 
of  troubles  and  carries  off  his  spoils.  Such  a  man  as 
Frank  Cowperwood  Mr.  Dreiser  understands.  He  un- 
derstands the  march  of  desire  to  its  goal.  He  seems 
always  to  have  been  curious  regarding  the  large  opera- 
tions of  finance,  at  once  stirred  on  his  poetical  side 
by  the  intoxication  of  golden  dreams,  something  as 
Marlowe  was  in  The  Jew  of  Malta,  and  on  his  cynical 
side  struck  by  the  mechanism  of  craft  and  courage  and 
indomitable  impulse  which  the  financier  employs.  Mr. 
Dreiser  writes,  it  is  true,  as  an  outsider;  he  simplifies 
the  account  of  Cowperwood's  adventures  after  wealth, 
touching  the  record  here  and  there  with  the  naive 
hand  of  a  peasant — even  though  a  peasant  of  geniue 


ARGUMENT  79 

— wondering  how  great  riches  are  actually  obtained 
and  guessing  somewhat  awkwardly  at  the  mystery. 
And  yet  these  guesses  perhaps  come  nearer  to  the 
truth  than  they  might  have  come  were  either  the  typical 
financier  or  Mr.  Dreiser  more  subtle.  You  cannot  set 
a  poet  to  catch  a  financier  and  be  at  all  sure  of  the 
prize.  As  it  is,  this  Trilogy  of  Desire  (never  com- 
pleted in  the  third  part  which  was  to  show  Cowper- 
wood  extending  his  mighty  foray  into  London)  is  as 
considerable  an  epic  as  American  business  has  yet  to 
show. 

Cowperwood's  lighter  hours  are  devoted  to  pursuits 
almost  as  polygamous  as  those  of  the  leader  of  some 
four-footed  herd.  In  this  respect  the  novels  which 
celebrate  him  stand  close  to  the  more  popular  Sister 
Carrie  and  Jennie  Gerhardt,  both  of  them  annals  of 
women  who  fall  as  easily  as  Cowperwood's  many  mis- 
tresses into  the  hand  of  the  conquering  male.  If  Mr. 
Dreiser  refuses  to  withhold  his  approbation  from  the 
lawless  financier,  he  withholds  it  even  less  from  the  law- 
less lover.  No  moralism  overlays  the  biology  of  these 
novels.  Sex  in  them  is  a  free-flowing,  expanding 
energy,  working  resistlessly  through  all  human  tissue, 
knowing  in  itself  neither  good  nor  evil,  habitually  at 
war  with  the  rules  and  taboos  which  have  been  devised 
by  mankind  to  hold  its  amative  impulses  within  con- 
venient bounds.  To  the  cosmic  philosopher  what  does 
it  matter  whether  this  or  that  human  male  mates  with 
this  or  that  human  female,  or  whether  the  mating  en- 
dures beyond  the  passionate  moment? 


80   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Viewing  such  matters  thus  Mr.  Dreiser  constantly 
underestimates  the  forces  which  in  civil  society  actually 
do  restrain  the  expansive  moods  of  sex.  At  least  he 
chooses  to  represent  love  almost  always  in  its  vagrant 
hours.  For  this  his  favorite  situation  is  in  large  part 
responsible:  that  of  a  strong  man,  no  longer  gener- 
ously young,  loving  downward  to  some  plastic,  igno- 
rant girl  dazzled  by  his  splendor  and  immediately 
compliant  to  his  advances.  Mr.  Dreiser  is  obsessed 
by  the  spectacle  of  middle  age  renewing  itself  at  the 
fires  of  youth — an  obsession  which  has  its  sentimental 
no  less  than  its  realistic  traits.  What  he  most  con- 
spicuously leaves  out  of  account  is  the  will  and  person- 
ality of  women,  whom  he  sees,  or  at  least  represents, 
with  hardly  any  exceptions  as  mere  fools  of  love,  mere 
wax  to  the  wooer,  who  have  no  separate  identities  till 
some  lover  shapes  them.  To  something  like  this  sim- 
plicity the  role  of  women  in  love  is  reduced  by  those 
Boccaccian  fabulists  who  adorn  the  village  taproom 
and  the  corner  grocery. 

Mr.  Dreiser  is  reported  to  consider  The  'Genius,9  a 
massive,  muddy,  powerful  narrative,  his  greatest  novel, 
though  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  cannot  be  compared  with 
Sister  Carrie  for  insight  or  accuracy  or  charm.  His 
partiality  may  perhaps  be  ascribed  to  his  strong  incli- 
nation toward  the  life  of  art,  through  which  his 
^Genius'  moves,  half  hero  and  half  picaro.  Witla  re- 
mains mediocre  enough  in  all  but  his  sexual  unscrupu- 
lousness,  but  he  is  impelled  by  a  driving  force  more  or 
less  like  those  forces  which  impel  Cowperwood.  The 


ARGUMENT  81 

will  to  wealth,  the  will  to  love,  the  will  to  art — Mr. 
Dreiser  conceives  them  all  as  blind  energies  with  no  goal 
except  self-realization.  So  conceiving  them  he  tends  to 
see  them  as  less  conditioned  than  they  ordinarily  are  in 
their  earthly  progress  by  the  resistance  of  statute  and 
habit.  Particularly  is  this  true  of  his  representation 
of  the  careers  of  artists.  Carrie  becomes  a  noted 
actress  in  a  few  short  weeks;  Witla  almost  as  rapidly 
becomes  a  noted  illustrator;  other  minor  characters 
here  and  there  in  the  novels  are  said  to  have  prodigious 
power  without  exhibiting  it.  Hardly  ever  does  there 
appear  any  delicate,  convincing  analysis  of  the  myste- 
rious behavior  of  true  genius.  Mr.  Dreiser's  artists 
are  hardly  persons  at  all;  they  are  creatures  driven, 
and  the  wonder  lies  primarily  in  the  impelling  energy. 
The  cosmic  philosopher  in  him  sees  the  beginning  and 
the  end  of  the  artistic  process  better  than  the  novelist 
in  him  sees  its  methods.  And  the  peasant  in  him, 
though  it  knows  the  world  of  art  as  vivid  and  beautiful 
and  though  it  has  investigated  that  world  at  first  hand, 
still  leads  him  to  report  it  in  terms  often  quaint,  melo- 
dramatic, invincibly  rural.  Witness  the  hundreds  of 
times  he  calls  things  "artistic." 

Two  of  his  latest  books  indicate  the  range  of  his 
gifts  and  his  excellences.  In  Hey  Rub-A-Dub-Dub, 
which  he  calls  A  Book  of  the  Mystery  and  Wonder  and 
Terror  of  Life,  he  undertook  to  expound  his  general 
philosophy  and  produced  the  most  negligible  of  all  his 
works.  He  has  no  faculty  for  sustained  argument. 
Like  Byron,  as  soon  as  he  begins  to  reason  he  is  less 


82    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

than  half  himself.  In  Twelve  Men,  on  the  other  hand, 
he  displays  the  qualities  by  virtue  of  which  he  attracts 
and  deserves  a  serious  attention.  Rarely  generalizing, 
he  portrays  a  dozen  actual  persons  he  has  known,  all 
his  honesty  brought  to  the  task  of  making  his  account 
fit  the  reality  exactly,  and  all  his  large  tolerance  exer- 
cised to  present  the  truth  without  malice  or  excuses. 
Here  lies  the  field  of  his  finest  victories,  here  and  in 
those  adjacent  tracts  of  other  books  which  are  nearest 
this  simple  method:  his  representation  of  old  Gerhardt 
and  of  Aaron  Berchansky  in  The  Hand  of  the  Potter; 
numerous  sketches  of  character  in  that  broad  pa- 
geant A  Hoosier  Holiday;  the  tenderly  conceived  rec- 
ord of  Caroline  Meeber,  wispy  and  witless  as  she  often 
is ;  the  masterly  study  of  Hurstwood's  deterioration  in 
Sister  Carrie — this  last  the  peak  among  all  Mr. 
Dreiser's  successes. 

Not  the  incurable  awkwardness  of  his  style  nor  his 
occasional  merciless  verbosity  nor  his  too  frequent  in- 
terposition of  crude  argument  can  destroy  the  effect 
which  he  produces  at  his  best — that  of  an  eminent  spirit 
brooding  over  a  world  which  in  spite  of  many  condem- 
nations he  deeply,  somberly  loves.  Something  peasant- 
like  in  his  genius  may  blind  him  a  little  to  the  finer 
shades  of  character  and  set  him  astray  in  his  reports 
of  cultivated  society.  His  conscience  about  telling  the 
plain  truth  may  suffer  at  times  from  a  dogmatic  toler- 
ance which  refuses  to  draw  lines  between  good  and  evil 
>r  between  beautiful  and  ugly  or  between  wise  and 
foolish.  But  he  gains,  on  the  whole^  as  much  as  he  loses 


ARGUMENT  83 

by  the  magnitude  of  his  cosmic  philosophizing.  These 
puny  souls  over  which  he  broods,  with  so  little  dignity 
in  themselves,  take  on  a  dignity  from  his  contemplation 
of  them.  Small  as  they  are,  he  has  come  to  them  from 
long  flights,  and  has  brought  back  a  lifted  vision  which 
enriches  his  drab  narratives.  Something  spacious, 
something  now  lurid  now  luminous,  surrounds  them. 
From  somewhere  sound  accents  of  an  authority  not 
sufficiently  explained  by  the  mere  accuracy  of  his  ver- 
sions of  life.  Though  it  may  indeed  be  difficult  for 
a  thinker  of  the  widest  views  to  contract  himself  to 
the  dimensions  needed  for  naturalistic  art,  and  though 
he  may  often  fail  when  he  attempts  it,  when  he  does 
succeed  he  has  the  opportunity,  which  the  mere  world- 
ling lacks,  of  ennobling  his  art  with  some  of  the  great 
light  of  the  poets. 


CHAPTER  III 
ART 

1.     BOOTH  TARKINGTON 

Booth  Tarkington  is  the  glass  of  adolescence  and 
the  mold  of  Indiana.  The  hero  of  his  earliest  novel, 
Harkless  in  The  Gentleman  from  Indiana,  drifts 
through  that  narrative  with  a  melancholy  stride  be- 
cause he  has  been  seven  long  years  out  of  college  and 
has  not  yet  set  the  prairie  on  fire.  But  Mr.  Tarking- 
ton, at  the  time  of  writing  distant  from  Princeton  by 
about  the  same  number  of  years  and  also  not  yet 
famous,  could  not  put  up  with  failure  in  a  hero.  So 
Harkless  appears  as  a  mine  of  latent  splendors. 
Carlow  County  idolizes  him,  evil-doers  hate  him,  grate- 
ful old  men  worship  him,  devoted  young  men  shadow 
his  unsuspecting  steps  at  night  in  order  to  protect  him 
from  the  villains  of  Six-Cross-Roads,  sweet  girls  adore 
him,  fortune  saves  him  from  dire  adventures,  and  in  the 
end  his  fellow-voters  choose  him  to  represent  their 
innumerable  virtues  in  the  Congress  of  their  country 
without  his  even  dreaming  what  affectionate  game  they 
are  at.  This  from  the  creator  of  Penrod,  who  at  the 
comical  age  of  twelve  so  often  lays  large  plans  for 
proving  to  the  heedless  world  that  he,  too,  has  been  a 

84 


ART  85 

hero  all  along!  In  somewhat  happier  hours  Mr. 
Tarkington  wrote  Monsieur  Beaucaire,  that  dainty 
romantic  episode  in  the  life  of  Prince  Louis-Philippe 
de  Valois,  who  masquerades  as  a  barber  and  then  as  a 
gambler  at  Bath,  is  misjudged  on  the  evidence  of  his 
own  disguises,  just  escapes  catastrophe,  and  in  the  end 
gracefully  forgives  the  gentlemen  and  ladies  who  have 
been  wrong,  parting  with  an  exquisite  gesture  from 
Lady  Mary  Carlisle,  the  beauty  of  Bath,  who  loves 
him  but  who  for  a  few  fatal  days  had  doubted.  This 
from  the  creator  of  William  Sylvanus  Baxter,  who  at 
the  preposterous  age  of  seventeen  imagines  himself 
another  Sydney  Carton  and  after  a  silent,  agonizing, 
condescending  farewell  goes  out  to  the  imaginary 
tumbril ! 

Just  such  postures  and  phantasms  of  adolescence 
lie  behind  all  Mr.  Tarkington's  more  serious  plots — 
and  not  merely  those  earlier  ones  which  he  constructed 
a  score  of  years  ago  when  the  mode  in  fiction  was  his- 
torical and  rococo.  Van  Revel  in  The  Two  Van  Revels, 
convinced  and  passionate  abolitionist,  nevertheless  be- 
comes as  hungry  as  any  fire-eater  of  them  all  the  mo- 
ment Polk  moves  for  war  on  Mexico,  though  to  Van 
Revel  the  war  is  an  evil  madness.  In  The  Conquest  of 
Canaan  Louden  plays  Prince  Hal  among  the  lowest  his 
town  affords,  only  to  mount  with  a  rush  to  the  mayor- 
alty when  he  is  ready.  The  Guest  of  Quesnay  takes 
a  hero  who  is  soiled  with  every  vileness,  smashes  his 
head  in  an  automobile  accident,  and  thus  transforms 
him  into  that  glorious  kind  of  creature  known  as  a 


86    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

"Greek  god'* — beautiful  and  innocent  beyond  belief 
or  endurance.  The  Turmoil  is  really  not  much  more 
veracious,  with  its  ugly  duckling,  Bibbs  Sheridan,  who 
has  ideas,  loves  beauty,  and  writes  verse,  but  who  after 
years  of  futile  dreaming  becomes  a  master  of  capital 
almost  overnight.  Even  The  Magnificent  Ambersons, 
with  its  wealth  of  admirable  satire,  does  not  satirize  its 
own  conclusion  but  rounds  out  its  narrative  with  a 
hasty  regeneration.  And  what  can  a  critic  say  of  such 
blatant  nonsense  as  arises  from  the  frenzy  of  propa- 
ganda in  Ramsey  Milholland? 

Perhaps  it  is  truer  to  call  Mr.  Tarkington's  plots 
sophomoric  than  to  call  them  adolescent.  Indeed,  the 
mark  of  the  undergraduate  almost  covers  them,  espe- 
cially of  the  undergraduate  as  he  fondly  imagines  him- 
self in  his  callow  days  and  as  he  is  foolishly  instructed 
to  regard  himself  by  the  more  vinous  and  more  hilari- 
ous of  the  old  graduates  who  annually  come  back  to  a 
college  to  offer  themselves — though  this  is  not  their 
conscious  purpose — as  an  object  lesson  in  the  loud 
triviality  peculiar  and  traditional  to  such  hours  of 
reunion.  Adolescence,  however,  when  left  to  itself,  has 
other  and  very  different  hours  which  Mr.  Tarkington 
shows  almost  no  signs  of  comprehending. 

The  author  of  Penrod,  of  Penrod  and  Sam,  and  of 
Seventeen  passes  for  an  expert  in  youth ;  rarely  has  so 
persistent  a  reputation  been  so  insecurely  founded. 
What  all  these  books  primarily  recall  is  the  winks  that 
adults  exchange  over  the  heads  of  children  who  are 
minding  their  own  business,  as  the  adults  are  not ;  the 


ART  87 

winks,  moreover,  of  adults  who  have  forgotten  the  inner 
concerns  of  adolescence  and  now  observe  only  its  sur- 
face awkwardnesses.  Real  adolescence,  like  any  other 
age  of  man,  has  its  own  passions,  its  own  poetry,  its 
own  tragedies  and  felicities;  the  adolescence  of  Mr. 
Tarkington's  tales  is  almost  nothing  but  farce — staged 
for  outsiders.  Not  one  of  the  characters  is  an  indi- 
vidual ;  they  are  all  little  monsters — amusing  monsters, 
it  is  true — dressed  up  to  display  the  stock  ambitions 
and  the  stock  resentments  and  the  stock  affectations 
and  the  stock  perturbations  of  the  heart  which  attend 
the  middle  teens.  The  pranks  of  Penrod  Schofield 
are  merely  those  of  Tom  Sawyer  repeated  in  another 
town,  without  the  touches  of  poetry  or  of  the  informing 
imagination  lent  by  Mark  Twain.  The  sighs  of  "Silly 
Bill"  Baxter — at  first  diverting,  it  is  also  true — are 
exorbitantly  multiplied  till  reality  drops  out  of  the 
semblance.  Calf-love  does  not  always  remain  a  joke 
merely  because  there  are  mature  spectators  to  stand  by 
nudging  one  another  and  roaring  at  the  discomfort 
which  love  causes  its  least  experienced  victims.  Those 
knowing  asides  which  accompany  these  juvenile  records 
have  been  mistaken  too  often  for  shrewd,  even  for  pro- 
found, analyses  of  human  nature.  Actually  they  are 
only  knowing,  as  sophomores  are  knowing  with  respect 
to  their  juniors  by  a  few  years.  In  contemporary 
American  fiction  Mr.  Tarkington  is  the  perennial  sopho- 
more. 

If  he  may  be  said  never  to  have  outgrown  Purdue  and 
Princeton,  so  also  may  he  be  said  never  to  have  out? 


88    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

grown  Indiana.  In  any  larger  sense,  of  course,  he  has 
not  needed  to.  A  novelist  does  not  require  a  universe 
in  which  to  find  the  universe,  which  lies  folded,  for  the 
sufficiently  perceptive  eye,  in  any  village.  Thoreau  and 
Emerson  found  it  in  Concord ;  Thomas  Hardy  in  Wes- 
sex  has  watched  the  world  move  by  without  himself 
moving.  But  Mr.  Tarkington  has  toward  his  native 
state  the  conscious  attitude  of  the  booster.  Smile  as 
he  may  at  the  too  emphatic  patriotism  of  this  or  that 
of  her  sons,  he  himself  nevertheless  expands  under  a 
similar  stimulus.  The  impulse  of  Harkless  to  clasp 
all  Carlow  County  to  his  broad  breast  obviously  sprang 
from  a  mood  which  Mr.  Tarkington  himself  had  felt. 
And  that  impulse  of  that  first  novel  has  been  repeated 
again  and  again  in  the  later  characters.  In  the  Arena, 
fruit  of  Mr.  Tarkington's  term  in  the  Indiana  legisla- 
ture, is  a  study  in  complacency.  Setting  out  to  take  the 
world  of  politics  as  he  finds  it,  he  comes  perilously  near 
to  ending  on  the  note  of  approval  for  it  as  it  stands — 
as  good,  on  the  whole,  as  any  possible  world.  His 
satire,  at  least,  is  on  the  side  of  the  established  order. 
A  certain  soundness  and  rightness  of  feeling,  a  natural 
hearty  democratic  instinct,  which  appears  in  the  novels, 
must  not  be  allowed  to  mislead  the  analyst  of  his  art. 
More  than  once,  to  his  credit,  he  satirically  recurs  to 
the  spectacle  of  those  young  Indianians  who  come  back 
from  their  travels  with  a  secret  condescension,  as  did 
George  Amberson  Minafer:  "His  politeness  was  of  a 
kind  which  democratic  people  found  hard  to  bear.  In 
a  word,  M.  le  Due  had  returned  from  the  gay  life  of 


ART  89 

the  capital  to  show  himself  for  a  week  among  the  loyal 
peasants  belonging  to  the  old  chateau,  and  their  quaint 
habits  and  costumes  afforded  him  a  mild  amusement." 
Such  passages,  however,  may  be  matched  with  irritating 
dozens  in  which  Mr.  Tarkington  swallows  Indiana 
whole. 

That  may  have  been  an  easier  task  than  to  perform 
a  similar  feat  with  the  state  to  the  east  of  Indiana, 
which  has  always  been  a  sort  of  halfway  house  between 
East  and  West;  or  with  that  to  the  north,  with  its 
many  alien  mixtures;  or  with  that  to  the  south,  the 
picturesque,  diversified  colony  of  Virginia ;  or  with  that 
to  the  west,  which,  thanks  in  large  part  to  Chicago,  is 
packed  with  savagery  and  genius.  Indiana,  at  any 
rate  till  very  recently,  has  had  an  indigenous  popula- 
tion, not  too  daring  or  nomadic ;  it  has  been  both  pros- 
perous and  folksy,  the  apt  home  of  pastorals,  the  agree- 
able habitat  of  a  sentimental  folk-poet  like  Riley,  the 
natural  begetter  of  a  canny  fabulist  like  George  Ade. 
It  has  a  tradition  of  realism  in  fiction,  but  that  tradi- 
tion descends  from  The  Hoosier  School-Master  and  it 
includes  a  full  confidence  in  the  folk  and  in  the  rural 
virtues — very  different  from  that  of  E.  W.  Howe  or 
Hamlin  Garland  or  Edgar  Lee  Masters  in  states  a  little 
further  outside  the  warm,  cozy  circle  of  the  Hoosiers. 
Indiana  has  a  tradition  of  romance,  too.  Did  not 
Indianapolis  publish  When  Knighthood  Was  in  Flower 
and  Alice  of  Old  Vincennes?  They  are  of  the  same  vin- 
tage as  Monsieur  Beaucaire.  And  both  romance  and 
realism  in  Indiana  have  traditionally  worn  the  same 


90    CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

smooth  surfaces,  the  same  simple — not  to  say  silly — 
faith  in  things-at-large :  God's  in  His  Indiana;  alPs 
right  with  the  world.  George  Ade,  being  a  satirist  of 
genius,  has  stood  out  of  all  this;  Theodore  Dreiser, 
Indianian  by  birth  but  hopelessly  a  rebel,  has  stood 
out  against  it;  but  Booth  Tarkington,  trying  to  be 
Hoosier  of  Hoosiers,  has  given  himself  up  to  the  ro- 
mantic and  sentimental  elements  of  the  Indiana  literary 
tradition. 

To  practise  an  art  which  is  genuinely  characteristic 
of  some  section  of  the  folk  anywhere  is  to  do  what  may 
be  important  and  is  sure  to  be  interesting.  But  Mr. 
Tarkington  no  more  displays  the  naivete  of  a  true  folk- 
novelist  than  he  displays  the  serene  vision  that  can  lift 
a  novelist  above  the  accidents  of  his  particular  time 
and  place.  This  Indianian  constantly  appears,  by 
his  allusions,  to  be  a  citizen  of  the  world.  He  knows 
Europe;  he  knows  New  York.  Again  and  again,  par- 
ticularly in  the  superb  opening  chapters  of  The  Mag- 
nificent Amber  sons,  he  rises  above  the  local  prejudices 
of  his  special  parish  and  observes  with  a  finely  critical 
eye.  But  whenever  he  comes  to  a  crisis  in  the  building 
of  a  plot  or  in  the  truthful  representation  of  a  char- 
acter he  sags  down  to  the  level  of  Indiana  senti- 
mentality. George  Minafer  departs  from  the  Hoosier 
average  by  being  a  snob;  time — and  Mr.  Tarkington's 
.plot — drags  the  cub  back  to  normality.  Bibbs  Sheridan 
departs  from  the  Hoosier  average  by  being  a  poet ;  time 
— and  Mr.  Tarkington's  plot — drags  the  cub  back  to 
normality.  Both  processes  are  the  same.  Perhaps  Mr. 


ART  91 

Tarkington  would  not  deliberately  say  that  snobbery 
and  poetry  are  equivalent  offenses,  but  he  does  not  par- 
ticularly distinguish.  Sympathize  as  he  may  with 
these  two  aberrant  youths,  he  knows  no  other  solution 
than  in  the  end  to  reduce  them  to  the  ranks.  He 
accepts,  that  is,  the  casual  Hoosier  valuation,  not  with 
pity  because  so  many  of  the  creative  hopes  of  youth 
come  to  naught  or  with  regret  that  the  flock  in  the  end 
so  frequently  prevails  over  individual  talent,  but  with 
a  sort  of  exultant  hurrah  at  seeing  all  the  wandering 
sheep  brought  back  in  the  last  chapter  and  tucked 
safely  away  in  the  good  old  Hoosier  fold. 

Viewed  critically  this  attitude  of  Mr.  Tarkington*s 
is  of  course  not  even  a  compliment  to  Indiana,  any 
more  than  it  is  a  compliment  to  women  to  take  always 
the  high  chivalrous  tone  toward  them,  as  if  they  were 
flawless  creatures;  any  more  than  it  is  a  compliment 
to  the  poor  to  assume  that  they  are  all  virtuous  or  to 
the  rich  to  assume  that  they  are  all  malefactors  of  a 
tyrannical  disposition.  If  Indiana  plays  microcosm 
to  Mr.  Tarkington's  art,  he  owes  it  to  his  state  to  find 
more  there  than  he  has  found — or  has  cared  to  set 
down;  he  owes  it  to  his  state  now  and  then  to  quarrel 
with  the  dominant  majority,  for  majorities  occasionally 
go  wrong,  as  well  as  men ;  he  owes  it  to  his  state  to  give 
up  his  method  of  starting  his  narrative  himself  and 
then  calling  in  popular  sentimentalism  to  advise  him 
how  to  bring  it  to  an  end. 

According  to  all  the  codes  of  the  more  serious  kinds 
of  fiction,  the  unwillingness — or  the  inability — to  con- 


92   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

duct  a  plot  to  its  legitimate  ending  implies  some  weak- 
ness in  the  artistic  character;  and  this  weakness  has 
been  Mr.  Tarkington's  principal  defect.  Nor  does  it 
in  any  way  appear  that  he  excuses  himself  by  citing 
the  immemorial  license  of  the  romancer.  Mr.  Tarking- 
ton  apparently  believes  in  his  own  conclusions.  Now 
this  causes  the  more  regret  for  the  reason  that  he  has 
what  is  next  best  to  character  in  a  novelist — that  is, 
knack.  He  has  the  knack  of  romance  when  he  wants 
to  employ  it:  a  light,  allusive  manner;  a  sufficient  ac- 
quaintance with  certain  charming  historical  epochs  and 
the  "properties"  thereto  pertaining — frills,  ruffs, 
rapiers,  insinuation;  a  considerable  expertness  in  the 
ways  of  the  "world" ;  gay  colors,  swift  moods,  the  note 
of  tender  elegy.  He  has  also  the  knack  of  satire,  which 
he  employs  more  frequently  than  romance.  With  what 
a  rapid,  joyous,  accurate  eye  he  has  surveyed  the 
processes  of  culture  in  "the  Midland  town"!  How 
quickly  he  catches  the  first  gesture  of  affectation  and 
how  deftly  he  sets  it  forth,  entertained  ^nd  entertain- 
ing !  From  the  chuckling  exordium  of  The  Magnificent 
Ambersons  it  is  but  a  step  to  The  Age  of  Innocence 
and  Main  Street.  Little  reflective  as  he  has  allowed 
himself  to  be,  he  has  by  shrewd  observation  alone 
succeeded  in  writing  not  a  few  chapters  which  have 
texture,  substance,  "thickness."  He  has  movement,  he 
has  energy,  he  has  invention,  he  has  good  temper,  he 
has  the  leisure  to  write  as  well  as  he  can  if  he  wishes  to. 
And,  unlike  those  dozens  of  living  American  writers  who 
once  each  wrote  one  good  book  and  then  lapsed  into 


ART  93 

dull  oblivion  or  duller  repetition,  he  has  traveled  a  long 
way  from  the  methods  of  his  greener  days. 

Why  then  does  he  continue  to  trifle  with  his  thread- 
bare adolescents,  as  if  he  were  afraid  to  write  candidly 
about  his  coevals?  Why  does  he  drift  with  the  senti- 
mental tide  and  make  propaganda  for  provincial  com- 
placency? He  must  know  better.  He  can  do  better. 

February  1921. 

POSTSCRIPT. — He  has  done  better.  Almost  as  if  to 
prove  a  somewhat  somber  critic  in  the  wrong  and  to 
show  that  newer  novelists  have  no  monopoly  of  the 
new  style  of  seriousness,  Mr.  Tarkington  has  in  Alice 
Adams  held  himself  veracious  to  the  end  and  has  pro- 
duced a  genuinely  significant  book.  Alice  is,  indeed, 
less  strictly  a  tragic  figure  than  she  appears  to  be. 
Desire,  in  any  of  the  deeper  senses,  she  shows  no  signs  of 
feeling;  what  she  loves  in  Russell  is  but  incidentally 
himself  and  actually  his  assured  position  and  his  as- 
sured prosperity.  So  considered,  her  machinations  to 
enchant  and  hold  him  have  a  comic  aspect ;  one  touch 
more  of  exaggeration  and  she  would  pass  over  to  join 
those  sorry  ladies  of  the  world  of  farce  who  take  a 
larger  visible  hand  in  wooing  than  human  customs 
happen  to  approve.  But  Mr.  Tarkington  withholds 
that  one  touch  more  of  exaggeration.  He  understands 
that  Alice's  instinct  to  win  a  husband  is  an  instinct  as 
powerful  as  any  that  she  has  and  is  all  that  she  has 
been  taught  by  her  society  to  have.  In  his  handling 
she  becomes  important ;  her  struggle,  without  the  aid 


94   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

of  guardian  dowager  or  beguiling  dot,  becomes  increas- 
ingly pathetic  as  the  narrative  advances;  and  her 
eventual  failure,  though  signalized  merely  by  her  resolu- 
tion to  desert  the  inhospitable  circles  of  privilege  for 
the  wider  universe  of  work,  carries  with  it  the  sting  of 
tragedy. 

Mr.  Tarkington  might  have  gone  further  than  he 
has  behind  the  bourgeois  assumptions  which  his  story 
takes  for  granted,  but  he  has  probably  been  wiser 
not  to.  Sticking  to  familiar  territory,  he  writes  with 
the  confident  touch  of  a  man  unconfused  by  speculation. 
His  style  is  still  swift,  still  easy,  still  flexible,  still  ac- 
curate in  its  conformity  to  the  vernacular.  He  at- 
tempts no  sentimental  detours  and  permits  himself  no 
popular  superfluities.  He  has  retained  all  his  tried 
qualities  of  observation  and  dexterity  while  admitting 
to  his  work  the  element  of  a  sterner  conscience  than 
it  has  heretofore  betrayed.  With  the  honesty  of  his 
conclusion  goes  the  mingling  of  mirth  and  sadness  in 
Alice  Adams  as  another  trait  of  its  superiority.  The 
manners  of  the  young  which  have  always  seemed  so 
amusing  to  Mr.  Tarkington  and  which  he  has  kept  on 
watching  and  laughing  at  as  his  principal  material,  now 
practically  for  the  first  time  have  evoked  from  him  a 
considerate  sense  of  the  pathos  of  youth.  It  strength- 
ens the  pathos  of  Alice's  fate  that  the  comedy  holds  out 
so  well ;  it  enlarges  the  comedy  of  it  that  its  pathos  is 
so  essential  to  the  action.  Even  the  most  comic  things 
have  their  tears.  August 


ART  95 

2.  EDITH  WHARTON 

At  the  outset  of  the  twentieth  century  O.  Henry,  in 
a  mood  of  reaction  from  current  snobbism,  discovered 
what  he  called  the  Four  Million;  and  during  the  same 
years,  in  a  mood  not  wholly  different,  Edith  Wharton 
rediscovered  what  she  would  never  have  called  the  Four 
Hundred.  Or  rather  she  made  known  to  the  consider- 
able public  which  peeps  at  fashionable  New  York 
through  the  obliging  windows  of  fiction  that  that  world 
was  not  so  simple  in  its  magnificence  as  the  inquisitive, 
but  uninstructed,  had  been  led  to  believe.  Behind  the 
splendors  reputed  to  characterize  the  great,  she  testi- 
fied on  almost  every  page  of  her  books,  lay  certain 
arcana  which  if  much  duller  were  also  much  more  desir- 
able. Those  splendors  were  merely  as  noisy  brass  to 
the  finer  metal  of  the  authentic  inner  circles.  These 
were  very  small,  and  they  suggested  an  American  aris- 
tocracy rather  less  than  they  suggested  the  aborigines 
of  their  native  continent. 

Ralph  Marvell  in  The  Custom  of  the  Country  de- 
scribed Washington  Square  as  the  "Reservation,"  and 
prophesied  that  "before  long  its  inhabitants  would  be 
exhibited  at  ethnological  shows,  pathetically  engaged 
in  the  exercise  of  their  primitive  industries."  Mrs. 
Wharton  has  exhibited  them  in  the  exercise  of  indus- 
tries not  precisely  primitive,  and  yet  aboriginal  enough, 
very  largely  concerned  in  turning  shapely  shoulders  to 
the  hosts  of  Americans  anxious  and  determined  to  in- 
vade their  ancient  reservations.  As  the  success  of  the 


96   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

women  in  keeping  new  aspirants  out  of  drawing-room 
and  country  house  has  always  been  greater  than  the 
success  of  the  men  in  keeping  them  out  of  Wall  Street, 
the  aboriginal  aristocracy  in  Mrs.  Wharton's  novels 
transacts  its  affairs  for  the  most  part  in  drawing- 
rooms  and  country  houses.  There,  however,  to  judge 
by  The  House  of  Mirth,  The  Custom  of  the  Country, 
and  The  Age  of  Innocence,  the  life  of  the  inhabitants, 
far  from  being  a  continuous  revel  as  represented  by  the 
popular  novelists,  is  marked  by  nothing  so  much  as  an 
uncompromising  decorum. 

Take  the  case  of  Lily  Bart  in  The  House  of  Mirth. 
She  goes  to  pieces  on  the  rocks  of  that  decorum, 
though  she  has  every  advantage  of  birth  except  a  for- 
tune, and  knows  the  rules  of  the  game  perfectly.  But 
she  cannot  follow  them  with  the  impeccable  equilibrium 
which  is  needful;  she  has  the  Aristotelian  hero's  fatal 
defect  of  a  single  weakness.  In  that  golden  game  not 
to  go  forward  is  to  fall  behind.  Lily  Bart  hesitates, 
oscillates,  and  is  lost.  Having  left  her  appointed 
course,  she  finds  on  trying  to  return  to  her  former 
society  that  it  is  little  less  impermeable  to  her  than  she 
has  seen  rank  outsiders  find  it.  Then  there  is  Undine 
Spragg  in  The  Custom  of  the  Country,  who,  marrying 
and  divorcing  with  the  happy  insensibility  of  the  ani- 
mals that  mate  for  a  season  only,  undertakes  to  force 
her  brilliant,  barren  beauty  into  the  centers  of  the  elect. 
Such  beauty  as  hers  can  purchase  much,  thanks  to  the 
desires  of  men,  and  Undine,  thanks  to  her  own  blindness 
as  regards  all  delicate  disapproval,  comes  within  sight 


ART  97 

of  her  goal.  But  in  the  end  she  fails.  The  custom 
of  her  country — Apex  City  and  the  easy-going  West — ' 
is  not  the  decorum  of  New  York  reinforced  by  European 
examples.  NewlancJ  Archer  and  Ellen  Olenska  in  The 
Age  of  Innocence  neither  lose  nor  seek  an  established 
position  within  the  social  mandarinate  of  Manhattan 
as  constituted  in  the  seventies  of  the  last  century. 
They  belong  there  and  there  they  remain.  But  at  what 
sacrifices  of  personal  happiness  and  spontaneous  ac- 
tion! They  walk  through  their  little  drama  with  the 
unadventurous  stride  of  puppets;  they  observe  dozens 
of  taboos  with  a  respect  allied  to  terror.  It  is  true 
that  they  appear  to  have  been  the  victims  of  the  pro- 
vincial "innocence"  of  their  generation,  but  the  newer 
generation  in  New  York  is  not  entirely  acquitted  of  a 
certain  complicity  in  the  formalism  of  its  past. 

From  the  first  Mrs.  Wharton's  power  has  lain  in  the 
ability  to  reproduce  in  fiction  the  circumstances  of  a 
compact  community  in  a  way  that  illustrates  the 
various  oppressions  which  such  communities  put  upon 
individual  vagaries,  whether  viewed  as  sin,  or  ignorance, 
or  folly,  or  merely  as  social  impossibility.  She  has,  of 
course,  studied  other  communities  than  New  York:  the 
priest-ridden  Italy  of  the  eighteenth  century  in  The 
Valley  of  Decision;  modern  France  in  Madame  de 
Treymes  and  The  Reef;  provincial  New  England  in 
The  Fruit  of  the  Tree.  What  characterizes  the  New 
York  novels  characterizes  these  others  as  well:  a  sense 
of  human  beings  living  in  such  intimate  solidarity  that 
no  one  of  them  may  vary  from  the  customary  path 


98   CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

without  in  some  fashion  breaking  the  pattern  and  in- 
viting some  sort  of  disaster. 

Novels  written  out  of  this  conception  of  existence 
fall  ordinarily  into  partizanship,  either  on  the  side  of 
the  individual  who  leaves  his  herd  or  on  the  side  of  the 
herd  which  runs  him  down  or  shuts  him  out  for  good. 
Mrs.  Wharton  has  always  been  singularly  unpartizan, 
as  if  she  recognized  it  as  no  duty  of  hers  to  do  more 
for  the  herd  or  its  members  than  to  play  over  the  spec- 
tacle of  their  clashes  the  long,  cold  light  of  her  magni- 
ficent irony.  At  the  same  time,  however,  her  attitude 
toward  New  York  society,  her  most  frequent  theme, 
has  slightly  "hanged.  The  House  of  Mirth,  published 
in  1905,  glows  with  certain  of  the  colors  of  the  grand 
style.  These  appear  hardly  at  all  in  The  Age  of 
Innocence,  published  in  1920,  as  if  Mrs.  Wharton's 
feeling  for  ceremony  had  diminished,  as  if  the  grand 
style  no  longer  found  her  so  susceptible  as  formerly. 
Possibly  her  advance  in  satire  may  arise  from  nothing 
more  significant  than  her  retreat  into  the  past  for  a 
subject.  Nevertheless,  one  step  forward  could  make 
her  an  invaluable  satirist  of  the  current  hour. 

Among  Mrs.  Wharton's  novels  are  two — Ethan 
Frome  and  Summer — which  unfold  the  tragedy  of  cir- 
cumstances apparently  as  different  as  possible  from 
those  chronicled  in  the  New  York  novels.  Her  fashion- 
able New  York  and  her  rural  New  England,  however, 
have  something  in  common.  In  the  desolate  communi- 
ties which  witness  the  agonies  of  Ethan  Frome  and 
Charity  Royall  not  only  is  there  a  stubborn  village 


ART  99 

decorum  but  there  are  also  the  bitter  compulsions  of  a 
helpless  poverty  which  binds  feet  and  wings  as  the  most 
ruthless  decorum  cannot  bind  them,  and  which  dulls  all 
the  hues  of  life  to  an  unendurable  dinginess.  As  a  mem- 
ber of  the  class  which  spends  prosperous  vacations  on 
the  old  soil  of  the  Puritans  Mrs.  Wharton  has  surveyed 
the  cramped  lives  of  the  native  remnant  with  a  pity 
springing  from  her  knowledge  of  all  the  freedom  and 
beauty  and  pleasure  which  they  miss.  She  consequently 
brings  into  her  narrative  an  outlook  not  to  be  found  in 
any  of  the  novelists  who  write  of  rural  New  England 
out  of  the  erudition  which  comes  of  more  intimate 
acquaintanceship.  Without  filing  down  her  characters 
into  types  she  contrives  to  lift  them  into  universal 
figures  of  aspiration  or  disappointment. 

In  Ethan  Frome,  losing  from  her  clear  voice  for  a 
moment  the  note  of  satire,  she  reaches  her  highest  point 
of  tragic  passion.  In  the  bleak  life  of  Ethan  Frome 
on  his  bleak  hillside  there  blooms  an  exquisite  love  which 
during  a  few  hours  of  rapture  promises  to  transform 
his  fate;  but  poverty  clutches  him,  drives  him  to  at- 
tempt suicide  with  the  woman  he  loves,  and  then  con- 
demns him  to  one  of  the  most  appalling  expiations  in 
fiction — to  a  slavery  in  comparison  with  which  his 
former  life  was  almost  freedom.  Not  since  Hawthorne 
has  a  novelist  built  on  the  New  England  soil  a  tragedy 
of  such  elevation  of  mood  as  this.  Freed  from  the 
bondage  of  local  color,  that  myopic  muse,  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton here  handles  her  material  not  so  much  like  a  quar- 
ryman  finding  curious  stones  and  calling  out  about 


100  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

them  as  like  a  sculptor  setting  up  his  finished  work  on 
a  commanding  hill. 

It  has  regularly  been  by  her  novels  that  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton  has  attracted  the  most  attention,  and  yet  her  short 
stories  are  of  a  quite  comparable  excellence.  About 
fifty  of  them  altogether,  they  show  her  swift,  ironical 
intelligence  flashing  its  light  into  numerous  corners 
of  human  life  not  large  enough  to  warrant  prolonged 
reports.  She  can  go  as  far  afield  as  to  the  ascetic 
ecstasies  and  agonies  of  medieval  religion,  in  The 
Hermit  and  the  Wild  Woman;  or  as  to  the  horrible 
revenge  of  Duke  Ercole  of  Vicenza,  in  The  Duchess  at 
Prayer;  or  as  to  the  murder  and  witchcraft  of  seven- 
teenth-century Brittany,  in  Kerfol.  Kerfol,  Afterward, 
and  The  Lady's  Maid's  Bell  are  as  good  ghost  stories 
as  any  written  in  many  years.  Bunner  Sisters,  an  ob- 
servant, tender  narrative,  concerns  itself  with  the  de- 
clinging  fortunes  of  two  shopkeepers  of  Stuyvesant 
Square  in  New  York's  age  of  innocence. 

For  the  most  part,  however,  the  locality  and  temper 
of  Mrs.  Wharton's  briefer  stories  are  not  so  remote 
as  these  from  the  center  of  her  particular  world, 
wherein  subtle  and  sophisticated  people  stray  in  the 
crucial  mazes  of  art  or  learning  or  love.  Her  artists 
and  scholars  are  likely  to  be  shown  at  some  moment  in 
which  a  passionate  ideal  is  in  conflict  with  a  lower  in- 
stinct toward  profit  or  reputation,  as  when  in  The 
Descent  of  Man  an  eminent  scientist  turns  his  feet 
ruinously  into  the  wide  green  descent  to  "popular" 
science,  or  as  when  in  The  Verdict  a  fashionable  painter 


ART  101 

of  talent  encounters  the  work  of  an  obscure  genius  and 
gives  up  his  own  career  in  the  knowledge  that  at  best 
he  can  never  do  but  third-rate  work.  Some  such  stress 
of  conflict  marks  almost  all  Mrs.  Wharton's  stories  of 
love,  which  make  up  the  overwhelming  majority  of  her 
work.  Love  with  her  in  but  few  cases  runs  the  smooth 
course  coincident  with  flawless  matrimony.  It  cuts 
violently  across  the  boundaries  drawn  by  marriages  of 
convenience,  and  it  suffers  tragic  changes  in  the  ob- 
jects of  its  desire. 

What  opportunity  has  a  free,  wilful  passion  in  the 
tight  world  Mrs.  Wharton  prefers  to  represent? 
Either  its  behavior  must  be  furtive  and  hypocritical 
or  else  it  must  incur  social  disaster.  Here  again 
Mrs.  Wharton  will  not  be  partizan.  If  in  one  story — 
such  as  The  Long  Rwn — she  seems  to  imply  that  there 
is  no  ignominy  like  that  of  failing  love  when  it  comes, 
yet  in  another — such  as  Souls  Belated — she  sets  forth 
the  costs  and  the  entanglements  that  ensue  when  indi- 
viduals take  love  into  their  own  hands  and  defy  society. 
Not  love  for  itself  but  love  as  the  most  frequent  and 
most  personal  of  all  the  passions  which  bring  the 
community  into  clashes  with  its  members — this  is  the 
subject  of  Mrs.  Wharton's  curiosity  and  study.  Her 
only  positive  conclusions  about  it,  as  reflected  in  her 
stories,  seem  to  be  that  love  cuts  deepest  in  the  deepest 
natures  and  yet  that  no  one  is  quite  so  shallow  as  to 
love  and  recover  from  it  without  a  scar.  Divorce,  ac- 
cording to  her  representations,  can  never  be  quite  com- 
plete ;  one  of  her  most  amusing  stories,  The  Other  Two, 


102  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

recounts  how  the  third  husband  of  a  woman  whose  first 
two  husbands  are  still  living  gradually  resolves  her  into 
her  true  constituency  and  finds  nothing  there  but  what 
one  husband  after  another  has  made  of  her. 

In  stories  like  this  Mrs.  Wharton  occasionally  leaves 
the  restraint  of  her  ordinary  manner  to  wear  the 
keener  colors  of  the  satirist.  Xingu,  for  instance,  with 
its  famous  opening  sentence — "Mrs.  Ballinger  is  one 
of  the  ladies  who  pursue  Culture  in  bands,  as  though 
it  were  dangerous  to  meet  alone" — has  the  flash  and 
glitter,  and  the  agreeable  artificiality,  of  polite  comedy. 
Undine  Spragg  and  the  many  futile  women  whom  Mrs. 
Wharton  enjoys  ridiculing  more  than  she  gives  evidence 
of  enjoying  anything  else  belong  nearly  as  much  to 
the  menagerie  of  the  satirist  as  to  the  novelist's  gallery. 
It  is  only  in  these  moments  of  satire  that  Mrs.  Wharton 
reveals  much  about  her  disposition:  her  impatience 
with  stupidity  and  affectation  and  muddy  confusion 
of  mind  and  purpose ;  her  dislike  of  dinginess ;  her  toler- 
ation of  arrogance  when  it  is  high-bred.  Such  qualities 
do  not  help  her,  for  all  her  spare,  clean  movement,  to 
achieve  the  march  or  rush  of  narrative;  such  qualities, 
for  all  her  satiric  pungency,  do  not  bring  her  into  sym- 
pathy with  the  sturdy  or  burly  or  homely,  or  with  the 
broader  aspects  of  comedy.  Lucidity,  detachment, 
irony — these  never  desert  her  (though  she  wrote  with 
the  hysterical  pen  that  hundreds  used  during  the  war) . 
So  great  is  her  self-possession  that  she  holds  criticism 
at  arm's  length,  somewhat  as  her  chosen  circles  hold  the 
barbarians.  If  she  had  a  little  less  of  this  pride  of 


ART  103 

dignity  she  might  perhaps  avoid  her  tendency  to  assign 
to  decorum  a  larger  power  than  it  actually  exercises, 
even  in  the  societies  about  which  she  writes.  Decorum, 
after  all,  is  binding  chiefly  upon  those  who  accept  it 
without  question  but  not  upon  passionate  or  logical 
rebels,  who  are  always  shattering  it  with  some  touch 
of  violence  or  neglect ;  neither  does  it  bind  those  who 
stand  too  securely  to  be  shaken.  For  this  reason  the 
coils  of  circumstance  and  the  pitfalls  of  inevitability 
with  which  Mrs.  Wharton  besets  the  careers  of  her  char- 
acters are  in  part  an  illusion  deftly  employed  for  the 
sake  of  artistic  effect.  She  multiplies  them  as  ro- 
mancers multiply  adventures. 

The  illusion  of  reality  in  her  work,  however,  almost 
never  fails  her,  so  alertly  is  her  mind  on  the  lookout 
to  avoid  vulgar  or  shoddy  romantic  elements.  Com- 
pared to  Henry  James,  her  principal  master  in  fiction, 
whom  she  resembles  in  respect  to  subjects  and  attitude, 
she  lacks  exuberance  and  richness  of  texture,  but  she 
has  more  intelligence  than  he.  Compared  to  Jane 
Austen,  the  novelist  among  Anglo-Saxon  women  whom 
Mrs.  Wharton  most  resembles,  particularly  as  regards 
satire  and  decorum,  she  is  the  more  impassioned  of  the 
two.  It  may  seem  at  first  thought  a  little  strange  to 
compare  the  vivid  novels  of  the  author  of  The  House  of 
Mirth  with  the  mouse-colored  narratives  of  the  author 
of  Pride  and  Prejudice,  for  the  twentieth  century  has 
added  to  all  fiction  many  overtones  not  heard  in  the 
eighteenth.  But  of  no  other  woman  writer  since  Jane 
Austen  can  it  be  said  quite  so  truthfully  as  of  Mrs. 


104  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Wharton  that  her  natural,  instinctive  habitat  is  a  true 
tower  of  irony. 

3.  JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL 

Although  most  novelists  with  any  historical  or 
scholarly  hankerings  are  satisfied  to  invent  here  a  scene 
and  there  a  plot  and  elsewhere  an  authority,  James 
Branch  Cabell  has  invented  a  whole  province  for  his 
imagination  to  dwell  in.  He  calls  it  Poictesme  and  sets 
it  on  the  map  of  medieval  Europe,  but  it  has  no  more 
unity  of  time  and  place  than  has  the  multitudinous 
land  of  The  Faerie  Queene.  Around  the  reigns  of  Dom 
Manuel,  Count  and  Redeemer  of  Poictesme,  epic  hero 
of  Figures  of  Earth,  father  of  the  heroine  in  The 
Soid  of  Melicent  (later  renamed  .Domnei),  father  of 
that  Dorothy  la  Desiree  whom  Jurgen  loved  (with  some 
other  women),  father  also  of  that  Count  Emmerich  who 
succeeded  Manuel  as  ruler  at  Bellegarde  and  Storisende 
— around  the  reigns  of  Manuel  and  Emmerich  the 
various  sagas  of  Mr.  Cabell  principally  revolve.  Scan- 
dinavia, however,  conveniently  impinges  upon  their 
province,  with  Constantinople  and  Barbary,  Massilia, 
Aquitaine,  Navarre,  Portugal,  Rome,  England,  Paris, 
Alexandria,  Arcadia,  Olympus,  Asgard,  and  the  Jeru- 
salems  Old  and  New.  As  many  ages  of  history  likewise 
converge  upon  Poictesme  in  its  ostensible  thirteenth  or 
fourteenth  century,  from  the  most  mythological  times 
only  a  little  this  side  of  Creation  to  the  most  contempo- 
rary America  of  Felix  Kennaston  who  lives  at  comfort- 


ART  105 

able  Lichfield  with  two  motors  and  with  money  in  four 
banks  but  in  his  mind  habitually  bridges  the  gap  by 
imagined  excursions  into  Poictesme  and  the  domains 
adjacent. 

Nothing  but  remarkable  erudition  in  the  antiquities 
as  Cockaigne  and  Faery  could  possibly  suffice  for  such 
adventures  as  Mr.  CabelPs,  and  he  has  very  remarkable 
erudition  in  all  that  concerns  the  regions  which  delight 
him.  And  where  no  authorities  exist  he  merrily  invents 
them,  as  in  the  case  of  his  Nicolas  of  Caen,  poet  of 
Normandy,  whose  tales  Dizain  des  Reines  are  said  to 
furnish  the  source  for  the  ten  stories  collected  in 
Chivalry,  and  whose  largely  lost  masterpiece  Le  Roman 
de  Lusignan  serves  as  the  basis  for  Domnei.  One 
British  critic  and  rival  of  Mr.  Cabell  has  lately  fretted 
over  the  unblushing  anachronisms  and  confused  geog- 
raphy of  this  parti-colored  world.  For  less  duli- 
witted  scholars  these  are  the  very  cream  of  the  Cabellian 
jest. 

The  cream  but  not  the  substance,  for  Mr.  Cabell 
has  a  profound  creed  of  comedy  rooted  in  that  romance 
which  is  his  regular  habit.  Romance,  indeed,  first  exer- 
cised his  imagination,  in  the  early  years  of  the  century 
when  in  many  minds  he  was  associated  with  the  deco- 
rative Howard  Pyle  and  allowed  his  pen  to  move  at  the 
languid  gait  then  characteristic  of  a  dozen  inferior 
romancers.  Only  gradually  did  his  texture  grow  firmer, 
his  tapestry  richer;  only  gradually  did  his  gaiety 
strengthen  into  irony.  Although  that  irony  was  the 
progenitor  of  the  comic  spirit  which  now  in  his  ma- 


106  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

turity  dominates  him,  it  has  never  shaken  off  the  ro- 
mantic elements  which  originally  nourished  it.  Rather, 
romance  and  irony  have  grown  up  in  his  work  side  by 
side.  His  Poictesme  is  no  less  beautiful  for  having 
come  to  be  a  country  of  disillusion ;  nor  has  his  increas- 
ing sense  of  the  futility  of  desire  robbed  him  of  his  old 
sense  that  desire  is  a  glory  while  it  lasts. 

He  allows  John  Charteris  in  Beyond  Life — for  the 
most  part  Mr.  Cabell's  mouthpiece — to  set  forth  the 
doctrine  that  romance  is  the  real  demiurge,  "the  first 
and  loveliest  daughter  of  human  vanity,"  whereby  man- 
kind is  duped — and  exalted.  "No  one  on  the  preferable 
side  of  Bedlam  wishes  to  be  reminded  of  what  we  are 
in  actuality,  even  were  it  possible,  by  any  disastrous 
miracle,  ever  to  dispel  the  mist  which  romance  has 
evoked  about  all  human  doings."  Therefore  romance 
has  created  the  "dynamic  illusions"  of  chivalry  and  love 
and  common  sense  and  religion  and  art  and  patriotism 
and  optimism,  and  therein  "the  ape  reft  of  his  tail  and 
grown  rusty  at  climbing"  has  clothed  himself  so  long 
that  as  he  beholds  himself  in  the  delusive  mirrors  he  has 
for  centuries  held  up  to  nature  he  believes  he  is  some- 
how of  cosmic  importance.  Poor  and  naked  as  this 
aspiring  ape  must  seem  to  the  eye  of  reason,  asks  Mr. 
Cabell,  is  there  not  something  magnificent  about  his 
imaginings?  Does  the  course  of  human  life  not  singu- 
larly resemble  the  dance  of  puppets  in  the  hands 
of  a  Supreme  Romancer?  How,  then,  may  any  one 
declare  that  romance  has  become  antiquated  or  can  ever 


ART  107 

cease  to  be  indispensable  to  mortal  character  and  mortal 
interest  ? 

The  difference  between  Mr.  Cabell  and  the  popular 
romancers  who  in  all  ages  clutter  the  scene  and  for 
whom  he  has  nothing  but  amused  contempt  is  that  they 
are  unconscious  dupes  of  the  demiurge  whereas  he, 
aware  of  its  ways  and  its  devices,  employs  it  almost  as 
if  it  were  some  hippogriif  bridled  by  him  in  Elysian 
pastures  and  respectfully  entertained  in  a  snug  Vir- 
ginian stable.  His  attitude  toward  romance  suggests 
a  cheerful  despair :  he  despairs  of  ever  finding  anything 
truer  than  romance  and  so  contents  himself  with  Poic- 
tesme  and  its  tributaries.  The  favorite  themes  of  ro- 
mance being  relatively  few,  he  has  not  troubled  greatly 
to  increase  them;  war  and  love  in  the  main  he  finds 
enough. 

Besides  these,  however,  he  has  always  been  deeply 
occupied  with  one  other  theme — the  plight  of  the  poet  in 
the  world.  That  sturdy  bruiser  Dom  Manuel,  for  in- 
stance, is  at  heart  a  poet  who  molds  figures  out  of  clay 
as  his  strongest  passion,  although  the  world,  according 
to  its  custom,  conspires  against  his  instinct  by  inter- 
rupting him  with  love  and  war  and  business,  and  in 
the  end  hustles  him  away  before  he  has  had  time  to  make 
anything  more  lovely  or  lasting  than  a  reputation  as  a 
hero.  In  the  amazing  fantasy  T~he  Cream  of  the  Jest 
Mr.  Cabell  has  embodied  the  visions  of  the  romancer 
Felix  Kennaston  so  substantially  that  Kennaston?s 
diurnal  walks  in  Lichfield  seem  hardly  as  real  as  those 


108  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

nightly  ventures  which  under  the  guise  of  Horvendile 
he  makes  into  the  glowing  land  he  has  created.  Nor  are 
the  two  universes  separated  by  any  tight  wall  which  the 
fancy  must  leap  over:  they  flow  with  exquisite  caprice 
one  into  another,  as  indeed  they  always  do  in  the 
consciousness  of  a  poet  who,  like  Kennaston  or  Mr. 
Cabell,  broods  continually  over  the  problem  how  best 
to  perform  his  function :  "to  write  perfectly  of  beautiful 
happenings." 

Of  all  the  fine  places  in  the  world  where  beautiful 
happenings  come  together,  Mr.  Cabell  argues,  incom- 
parably the  richest  is  in  the  consciousness  of  a  poet 
who  is  also  a  scholar.  There  are  to  be  found  the 
precious  hoarded  memories  of  some  thousands  of  years : 
high  deeds  and  burning  loves  and  eloquent  words  and 
surpassing  tears  and  laughter.  There,  consequently, 
the  romancer  may  well  take  his  stand,  distilling  bright 
new  dreams  out  of  ancient  beauty.  And  if  he  adds  the 
heady  tonic  of  an  irony  springing  from  a  critical  in- 
telligence, so  much  the  better.  When  Mr.  Cabell  wishes 
to  represent  several  different  epochs  in  The  Certain 
Hour  he  chooses  to  tell  ten  stories  of  poets — real  or 
Imagined — as  the  persons  in  whom,  by  reason  of  their 
superior  susceptibility,  the  color  of  their  epochs  may  be 
most  truthfully  discovered;  and  when  he  wishes  to  de- 
cant his  own  wit  and  wisdom  most  genuinely  the  vessel 
he  normally  employs  is  a  poet. 

If  the  poets  and  warriors  who  make  up  the  list  of  Mr. 
Cabell's  heroes  devote  their  lives  almost  wholly  to  love, 
it  is  for  the  reason  that  no  other  emotion  interests  him 


ART  109 

so  much  or  seems  to  him  to  furnish  so  many  beautiful 
happenings  about  which  to  write  perfectly.  Love,  like 
art,  is  a  species  of  creation,  and  the  moods  which  attend 
it,  though  illusions,  are  miracles  none  the  less.  Of  the 
two  aspects  of  love  which  especially  attract  Mr.  Cabell 
he  has  given  the  larger  share  of  his  attention  to  the  ex- 
travagant worship  of  women  ("domnei")  developed  out 
of  chivalry — the  worship  which  began  by  ascribing  to 
the  beloved  the  qualities  of  purity  and  perfection,  of 
beauty  and  holiness,  and  ended  by  practically  identify- 
ing her  with  the  divine.  This  supernal  folly  reaches 
its  apogee  in  Domnei,  in  the  careers  of  Perion  and 
Melicent  who  are  so  uplifted  by  ineffable  desire  that 
their  souls  ceaselessly  reach  out  to  each  other  though 
obstacles  large  as  continents  intervene.  For  Perion  the 
most  deadly  battles  are  but  thornpricks  in  the  quest 
of  Melicent ;  and  such  is  Melicent's  loyalty  during  the 
years  of  her  longing  that  the  possession  of  her  most 
white  body  by  Demetrios  of  Anatolia  leaves  her  soul  im- 
maculate and  almost  unperturbed.  In  this  tale  love  is 
canonized:  throned  on  alabaster  above  all  the  vulgar 
gods  it  diffuses  among  its  worshipers  a  crystal  ra- 
diance in  which  mortal  imperfections  perish — or  are  at 
least  forgotten  during  certain  rapturous  hours. 

Ordinarily  one  cynical  touch  will  break  such  pretty 
bubbles ;  but  Mr.  Cabell,  himself  a  master  of  cynical 
touches  and  shrewdly  anticipant  of  them,  protects  his 
invention  with  the  competent  armor  of  irony,  and  now 
and  then — particularly  in  the  felicitous  tenson  spoken 
by  Perion  and  Demetrios  concerning  the  charms  of 


110  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Melicent — brings  mirth  and  beauty  to  an  amalgam 
which  bids  fair  to  prove  classic  metal.  A  much  larger 
share  of  this  mirth  appears  in  Jurgen,  which  narrates 
with  phallic  candor  the  exploits  of  a  middle-aged  pawn- 
broker of  Poictesme  in  pursuit  of  immortal  desire.  Of 
course  he  does  not  find  it,  for  the  sufficient  reason  that, 
as  Mr.  Cabell  understands  such  matters,  the  ultimate 
magic  of  desire  lies  in  the  inaccessibility  of  the  desired ; 
and  Jurgen,  to  whom  all  women  in  his  amorous  Cock- 
aigne are  as  accessible  as  bread  and  butter,  after  his  sly 
interval  of  rejuvenation  comes  back  in  the  end  to  his 
wife  and  his  humdrum  duty  with  a  definite  relief.  He 
may  be  no  more  in  love  with  Dame  Lisa  than  with  his 
right  hand,  and  yet  both  are  considerably  more  neces- 
sary to  his  well-being,  he  discovers,  than  a  number  of 
more  exciting  things. 

Love  in  Jurgen  inclines  toward  another  aspect  of 
the  passion  which  Mr.  Cabell  has  studied  somewhat  less 
than  the  chivalrous — the  aspect  of  gallantry.  "I  have 
read,"  says  John  Charteris,  "that  the  secret  of  gal- 
lantry is  to  accept  the  pleasures  of  life  leisurely,  and 
its  inconveniences  with  a  shrug;  as  well  as  that,  among 
other  requisites,  the  gallant  person  will  always  consider 
the  world  with  a  smile  of  toleration,  and  his  own  doings 
with  a  smile  of  honest  amusement,  and  Heaven  with  a 
smile  which  is  not  distrustful — being  thoroughly  per- 
suaded that  God  is  kindlier  than  the  genteel  would  re- 
gard as  rational."  These  are  the  accents,  set  to  slightly 
different  rhythms,  of  a  Congreve;  and  if  there  is  any- 
thing as  remarkable  about  Mr.  Cabell  as  the  fact  that 


ART  111 

he  has  represented  the  chivalrous  and  the  gallant  atti- 
tudes toward  love  with  nearly  equal  sympathy,  it  is 
the  fact  that  in  an  era  of  militant  naturalism  and  of 
renascent  moralism  he  has  blithely  adhered  to  an  affec- 
tion for  unconcerned  worldliness  and  has  airily  played 
Congreve  in  the  midst  of  all  the  clamorous,  serious, 
disquisitive  bassoons  of  the  national  orchestra. 

In  The  Cords  of  Vanity  Robert  Townsend  goes  gath- 
ering roses  and  tasting  lips  almost  as  if  the  second 
Charles  were  still  the  lawful  ruler  of  his  obedient  prov- 
ince of  Virginia;  and  in  The  Rivet  in  Grandfather's 
Neck  Rudolph  Musgrave,  that  quaint  figure  whittled 
out  of  chivalry  and  dressed  up  in  amiable  heroics,  is 
plainly  contrasted  with  the  glib  rogue  of  genius  John 
Charteris,  who,  elsewhere  in  Mr.  Cabell's  books  gener- 
ally the  chorus,  here  enters  the  plot  and  exhibits  a  sorry 
gallantry  in  action.  Poictesme,  these  novels  indicate, 
is  not  the  only  country  Mr.  Cabell  knows;  he  knows 
also  how  to  feel  at  home,  when  he  cares  to,  in  the  mimic 
universe  of  Lichfield  and  Fairhaven,  where  gay  ribbons 
perpetually  flutter,  and  where  eyes  and  hands  perpetu- 
ally invite,  and  where  love  runs  a  deft,  dainty,  fickle 
course  in  all  weathers. 

That  Felix  Kennaston  inhabits  Lichfield  in  the  flesh 
and  in  the  spirit  elopes  into  Poictesme  may  be  taken, 
after  a  fashion,  as  allegory  with  an  autobiographical 
foundation:  The  Cream  of  the  Jest  is,  on  the  whole, 
the  essence  of  Cabell.  The  book  suggests,  moreover, 
a  critical  position — which  is,  that  gallantry  and  Vir- 
ginia have  so  far  been  regrettably  sacrificed  to  chivalry 


112  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

and  Poictesme  in  the  career  of  Mr.  CabelPs  imagina- 
tion. Not  only  the  symmetry  expected  of  that  career 
demands  something  different;  so  does  its  success  with 
the  gallantries  of  Lichfield.  In  spite  of  all  Mr.  Cabell's 
accumulation  of  erudite  allusions  the  atmosphere  of 
his  Poictesme  often  turns  thin  and  leaves  his  charac- 
ters gasping  for  vital  breath;  nor  does  he  entirely 
restore  it  by  multiplying  symbols  as  he  does  in  Jurgen 
and  Figures  of  Earth  until  the  background  of  his  nar- 
rative is  studded  with  rich  images  and  piquant  chimeras 
that  perplex  more  than  they  illuminate — and  some- 
times bore.  These  chivalric  loves  beating  their  heads 
against  the  cold  moon  are,  after  all,  follies,  however 
supernal;  they  are  as  brief  as  they  are  bright;  in  the 
end  even  the  greedy  Jurgen  turns  back  to  honest  salt 
from  too  much  sugar. 

Now  in  gallantry  as  Mr.  Cabell  conceives  and  repre- 
sents it  there  is  always  the  salt  of  prudence,  of  satire, 
of  comedy ;  and  his  gifts  in  this  direction  are  too  great 
to  be  neglected.  The  comic  spirit,  let  it  be  remem- 
bered, has  led  Mr.  Cabell  from  the  softness  and  sweet- 
ness which  in  spots  disfigured  his  earlier  romances — 
such  as  The  Line  of  Love  and  Chivalry — before  he 
recently  revised  them;  it  has  happily  kept  in  hand  the 
wild  wings  of  his  later  love  stories ;  now  it  deserves  to 
have  its  way  unburdened,  at  least  occasionally.  While 
it  almost  had  its  way  in  Jurgen,  where  it  behaved  like 
a  huge  organ  bursting  into  uproarious  laughter,  it 
still  had  to  carry  the  burden  of  much  learning.  It 
would  be  freer  of  such  delectable  plunder  could  it  once 


ART  113 

burst  into  uproar  in  the  midst  of  Virginia.  Mr. 
Cabell  has  singled  out  two  very  dissimilar  poets  for 
particular  compliment:  Marlowe  and  Congreve.  As 
regards  the  still  more  particular  compliment  of  imita- 
tion, however,  he  has  done  Congreve  rather  less  than 
justice. 

4.     WIKLA  GATHER 

When  Willa  Gather  dedicated  her  first  novel,  0 
Pioneers!,  to  the  memory  of  Sarah  Orne  Jewett,  she 
pointed  out  a  link  of  natural  piety  binding  her  to  a 
literary  ancestor  now  rarely  credited  with  descendants 
so  robust.  The  link  holds  even  yet  in  respect  to  the 
clear  outlines  and  fresh  colors  and  simple  devices  of 
Miss  Gather's  art;  in  respect  to  the  body  and  range 
of  her  work  it  never  really  held.  The  thin,  fine  gen- 
tility which  Miss  Jewett  celebrates  is  no  further  away 
from  the  rich  vigor  of  Miss  Gather's  pioneers  than  is 
the  kindly  sentiment  of  the  older  woman  from  the  native 
passion  of  the  younger.  Miss  Jewett  wrote  of  the 
shadows  of  memorable  events.  Once  upon  a  time,  her 
stories  all  remind  us,  there  was  an  heroic  cast  to  New 
England.  In  Miss  Jewett's  time  only  the  echoes  of 
those  Homeric  days  made  any  noise  in  the  world — at 
least  for  her  ears  and  the  ears  of  most  of  her  literary 
contemporaries.  Unmindful  of  the  roar  of  industrial 
New  England  she  kept  to  the  milder  regions  of  her 
section  and  wrote  elegies  upon  the  epigones. 

In  Miss  Gather's  quarter  of  the  country  there  were 
still  heroes  during  the  days  she  has  written  about,  still 


114  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

pioneers.  The  sod  and  swamps  of  her  Nebraska  prai- 
ries defy  the  hands  of  labor  almost  as  obstinately  as 
did  the  stones  and  forests  of  old  New  England.  Her 
Americans,  like  all  the  Agamemnons  back  of  Miss 
Jewett's  world,  are  fresh  from  Europe,  locked  in  a 
mortal  conflict  with  nature.  If  now  and  then  the  older 
among  them  grow  faint  at  remembering  Bohemia  or 
France  or  Scandinavia,  this  is  not  the  predominant 
mood  of  their  communities.  They  ride  powerfully  for- 
ward on  a  wave  of  confident  energy,  as  if  human  life 
had  more  dawns  than  sunsets  in  it.  For  the  most  part 
her  pioneers  are  unreflective  creatures,  driven  by  some 
inner  force  which  they  do  not  comprehend:  they  are, 
that  is  perhaps  no  more  than  to  say,  primitive  and 
epic  in  their  dispositions. 

Is  it  by  virtue  of  a  literary  descent  from  the  New 
England  school  that  Miss  Gather  depends  so  fre- 
quently upon  women  as  protagonists?  Alexandra 
Bergson  in  0  Pioneers!,  Thea  Kronborg  in  The  Song 
of  the  Lark,  Antonia  Shimerda  in  My  Antonia — 
around  these  as  girls  and  women  the  actions  primarily 
revolve.  It  is  not,  however,  as  other  Helens  or 
Gudruns  that  they  affect  their  universes;  they  are 
not  the  darlings  of  heroes  but  heroes  themselves. 
Alexandra  drags  her  dull  brothers  after  her  and 
establishes  the  family  fortunes;  Antonia,  less  positive 
and  more  pathetic,  still  holds  the  center  of  her  retired 
stage  by  her  rich,  warm,  deep  goodness;  Thea,  a 
genius  in  her  own  right,  outgrows  her  Colorado  birth- 
place and  becomes  a  famous  singer  with  all  the  fierce 


ART  115 

energy  of  a  pioneer  who  happens  to  be  an  instinctive 
artist  rather  than  an  instinctive  manager,  like  Alex- 
andra, or  an  instinctive  mother,  like  Antonia.  And  is 
it  because  women  are  here  protagonists  that  neither 
wars,  as  among  the  ancients,  nor  machines,  as  among 
the  moderns,  promote  the  principal  activities  of  the 
characters?  Less  the  actions  than  the  moods  of  these 
novels  have  the  epic  air.  Narrow  as  Miss  Gather's 
scene  may  be,  she  fills  it  with  a  spaciousness  and  candor 
of  personality  that  quite  transcends  the  gnarled  eccen- 
tricity and  timid  inhibitions  of  the  local  colorists. 
Passion  blows  through  her  chosen  characters  like  a 
free,  wholesome,  if  often  devastating  wind ;  it  does  not, 
as  with  Miss  Jewett  and  her  contemporaries,  lurk  in 
furtive  corners  or  hide  itself  altogether.  And  as  these 
passions  are  most  commonly  the  passions  of  home- 
keeping  women,  they  lie  nearer  to  the  core  of  human 
existence  than  if  they  arose  out  of  the  complexities  of 
a  wider  region. 

Something  more  than  Miss  Gather's  own  experience 
first  upon  the  frontier  and  then  among  artists  and 
musicians  has  held  her  almost  entirely  to  those  two 
worlds  as  the  favored  realms  of  her  imagination.  In 
them,  rather  than  in  bourgeois  conditions,  she  finds  the 
theme  most  congenial  to  her  interest  and  to  her  powers. 
That  theme  is  the  struggle  of  some  elect  individual  to 
outgrow  the  restrictions  laid  upon  him — or  more  fre- 
quently her — by  numbing  circumstances.  The  early, 
somewhat  inconsequential  Alexander* s  Bridge  touches 
this  theme,  though  Bartley  Alexander,  like  the  bridge 


116  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

he  is  building,  fails  under  the  strain,  largely  by  reason 
of  a  flawed  simplicity  and  a  divided  energy.  Pioneers 
and  artists,  in  Miss  Gather's  understanding  of  their 
natures,  are  practically  equals  in  single-mindedness ; 
at  least  they  work  much  by  themselves,  contending 
with  definite  though  ruthless  obstacles  and  looking 
forward,  if  they  win,  to  a  freedom  which  cannot  be 
achieved  in  the  routine  of  crowded  communities.  To 
become  too  much  involved,  for  her  characters,  is  to  lose 
their  quality.  There  is  Marie  Tovesky,  in  0  Pioneers!, 
whom  nothing  more  preventable  than  her  beauty  and 
gaiety  drags  into  a  confused  status  and  so  on  to 
catastrophe.  Antonia,  tricked  into  a  false  relation 
by  her  scoundrel  lover,  and  Alexandra,  nagged  at  by 
her  stodgy  family  because  her  suitor  is  poor,  suffer 
temporary  eclipses  from  which  only  their  superb  health 
of  character  finally  extricates  them.  Thea  Kronborg, 
troubled  by  the  swarming  sensations  of  her  ^rst  year 
in  Chicago,  has  to  find  her  true  self  ag°m  in  that 
marvelous  desert  canyon  in  Arizona  where  hot  sun 
and  bright,  cold  water  and  dim  memories  of  the  cliff- 
dwelling  Ancient  People  detach  her  from  the  stupid 
faces  which  have  haunted  and  unnerved  her. 

Miss  Gather  would  not  belong  to  her  generation  if 
she  did  not  resent  the  trespasses  which  the  world  regu- 
larly commits  upon  pioneers  and  artists.  For  all  the 
superb  vitality  of  her  frontier,  it  faces — and  she  knows 
it  faces — the  degradation  of  its  wild  freedom  and 
beauty  by  clumsy  towns,  obese  vulgarity,  the  uniform 
of  a  monotonous  standardization.  Her  heroic  days 


ART  117 

endure  but  a  brief  period  before  extinction  comes. 
Then  her  high-hearted  pioneers  survive  half  as  curiosi- 
ties in  a  new  order;  and  their  spirits,  transmitted  to 
the  artists  who  are  their  legitimate  successors,  take  up 
the  old  struggle  in  a  new  guise.  In  the  short  story 
called  The  Sculptor's  Funeral  she  lifts  her  voice  in 
swift  anger  and  in  A  Gold  Slipper  she  lowers  it  to 
satirical  contempt  against  the  dull  souls  who  either 
misread  distinction  or  crassly  overlook  it. 

At  such  moments  she  enlists  in  the  crusade  against 
dulness  which  has  recently  succeeded  the  hereditary 
crusade  of  American  literature  against  wickedness. 
But  from  too  complete  an  absorption  in  that  transient 
war  she  is  saved  by  the  same  strength  which  has  lifted 
her  above  the  more  trivial  concerns  of  local  color.  The 
older  school  uncritically  delighted  in  all  the  village 
singularities  it  could  discover;  the  newer  school  no 
less  uncritically  condemns  and  ridicules  all  the  village 
conventionalities.  Miss  Gather  has  seldom  swung  far 
either  to  the  right  or  to  the  left  in  this  controversy. 
She  has,  apparently,  few  revenges  to  take  upon  the 
communities  in  which  she  lived  during  her  expanding 
youth.  An  eye  bent  too  relentlessly  upon  dulness 
could  have  found  it  in  Alexandra  Bergson,  with  her 
slow,  unimaginative  thrift;  or  in  Antonia  Shimerda, 
who  is  a  "hired  girl"  during  the  days  of  her  tenderest 
beauty  and  the  hard-worked  mother  of  many  children 
on  a  distant  farm  to  the  end  of  the  story.  Miss 
Gather,  almost  alone  among  her  peers  in  this  decade, 
understands  that  human  character  for  its  own  sake 


118  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

has  a  claim  upon  human  interest,  surprisingly  irre- 
spective of  the  moral  or  intellectual  qualities  which 
of  course  condition  and  shape  it. 

"Her  secret?"  says  Harsanyi  of  Thea  Kronborg  in 
The  Song  of  the  Lark.  "It  is  every  artist's  secret 
.  .  .  passion.  It  is  an  open  secret,  and  perfectly  safe. 
Like  heroism,  it  is  inimitable  in  cheap  materials."  In 
these  words  Miss  Gather  furnishes  an  admirable  com- 
mentary upon  the  strong  yet  subtle  art  which  she  her- 
self practises.  Fiction  habitually  strives  to  reproduce 
passion  and  heroism  and  in  all  but  chosen  instances 
falls  below  the  realities  because  it  has  not  truly  com- 
prehended them  or  because  it  tries  to  copy  them  in 
cheap  materials.  It  is  not  Miss  Gather's  lucid  intelli- 
gence alone,  though  that  too  is  indispensable,  which 
has  kept  her  from  these  ordinary  blunders  of  the  novel- 
ist: she  herself  has  the  energy  which  enables  her  to 
feel  passion  and  the  honesty  which  enables  her  to  re- 
produce it.  Something  of  the  large  tolerance  which 
she  must  have  felt  in  Whitman  before  she  borrowed 
from  him  the  title  of  0  Pioneers!  breathes  in  all  her 
work.  Like  him  she  has  tasted  the  savor  of  abounding 
health ;  like  him  she  has  exulted  in  the  sense  of  vast  dis- 
tances, the  rapture  of  the  green  earth  rolling  through 
space,  the  consciousness  of  past  and  future  striking 
hands  in  the  radiant  present;  like  him  she  enjoys 
"powerful  uneducated  persons"  both  as  the  means  to  a 
higher  type  and  as  ends  honorable  in  themselves.  At 
the  same  time  she  does  not  let  herself  run  on  in  the 
ungirt  dithyrambs  of  Whitman  or  into  his  followers' 


ART  119 

glorification  of  sheer  bulk  and  impetus.  Taste  and 
intelligence  hold  her  passion  in  hand.  It  is  her  dis- 
tinction that  she  combines  the  merits  of  those  oddly 
matched  progenitors,  Miss  Jewett  and  Walt  Whitman: 
she  has  the  delicate  tact  to  paint  what  she  sees  with 
clean,  quiet  strokes ;  and  she  has  the  strength  to  look 
past  casual  surfaces  to  the  passionate  center  of  her 
characters. 

The  passion  of  the  artist,  the  heroism  of  the  pioneer 
— these  are  the  human  qualities  Miss  Gather  knows 
best.  Compared  with  her  artists  the  artists  of  most 
of  her  contemporaries  seem  imitated  in  cheap  mate- 
rials. They  suffer,  they  rebel,  they  gesticulate,  they 
pose,  they  fail  through  success,  they  succeed  through 
failure ;  but  only  now  and  then  do  they  have  the  breath- 
ing, authentic  reality  of  Miss  Gather's  painters  and 
musicians.  Musicians  she  knows  best  among  artists — 
perhaps  has  been  most  interested  in  them  and  has  asso- 
ciated most  with  them  because  of  the  heroic  vitality 
which  a  virtuoso  must  have  to  achieve  any  real  emi- 
nence. The  poet  may  languish  over  verses  in  his  gar- 
ret, the  painter  or  sculptor  over  work  conceived  and 
executed  in  a  shy  privacy;  but  the  great  singer  must 
be  an  athlete  and  an  actor,  training  for  months  and 
years  for  the  sake  of  a  few  hours  of  triumph  before  a 
throbbing  audience.  It  is,  therefore,  not  upon  the  re- 
volt of  Thea  Kronborg  from  her  Colorado  village  that 
Miss  Gather  lays  her  chief  stress  but  upon  the  girl's 
hard,  unspeculative,  daemonic  integrity.  She  lifts  her- 
self from  alien  conditions  hardly  knowing  what  she 


120  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

does,  almost  as  a  powerful  animal  shoulders  its  in- 
stinctive way  through  scratching  underbrush  to  food 
and  water.  Thea  may  be  checked  and  delayed  by  all 
sorts  of  human  complications  but  her  deeper  nature 
never  loses  the  sense  of  its  proper  direction.  Ambi- 
tion with  her  is  hardly  more  than  the  passion  of  self- 
preservation  in  a  potent  spirit. 

That  Miss  Gather  no  less  truly  understands  the 
quieter  attributes  of  heroism  is  made  evident  by  the 
career  of  Antonia  Shimerda — of  Miss  Gather's  hero- 
ines the  most  appealing.  Antonia  exhibits  the  ordinary 
instincts  of  self-preservation  hardly  at  all.  She  is 
gentle  and  confiding;  service  to  others  is  the  very 
breath  of  her  being.  Yet  so  deep  and  strong  is  the 
current  of  motherhood  which  runs  in  her  that  it  ex- 
tricates her  from  the  level  of  mediocrity  as  passion  it- 
self might  fail  to  do.  Goodness,  so  often  negative  and 
annoying,  amounts  in  her  to  an  heroic  effluence  which 
imparts  the  glory  of  reality  to  all  it  touches.  "She 
lent  herself  to  immemorial  human  attitudes  which  we 
recognize  as  universal  and  true.  .  .  .  She  had  only  to 
stand  in  the  orchard,  to  put  her  hand  on  a  little  crab 
tree  and  look  up  at  the  apples,  to  make  you  feel  the 
goodness  of  planting  and  tending  and  harvesting  at 
last.  .  .  .  She  was  a  rich  mine  of  life,  like  the  founders 
of  early  races."  It  is  not  easy  even  to  say  things  so 
illuminating  about  a  human  being;  it  is  all  but  impos- 
sible to  create  one  with  such  sympathetic  art  that  words 
like  these  at  the  end  confirm  and  interpret  an  impres- 
sion already  made. 


ART  121 

My  Antonia,  following  0  Pioneers!  and  The  Song 
of  the  Lark,  holds  out  a  promise  for  future  develop- 
ment that  the  work  of  but  two  or  three  other  estab- 
lished American  novelists  holds  out.  Miss  Gather's 
recent  volume  of  short  stories  Youth  and  the  Bright 
Medusa,  striking  though  it  is,  represents,  it  may  be 
hoped,  but  an  interlude  in  her  brilliant  progress.  Such 
passion  as  hers  only  rests  itself  in  brief  tales  and 
satire;  then  it  properly  takes  wing  again  to  larger 
regions  of  the  imagination.  Vigorous  as  it  is,  its  fur- 
ther course  cannot  easily  be  foreseen;  it  has  not  the 
kind  of  promise  that  can  be  discounted  by  confident 
expectations.  Her  art,  however,  to  judge  it  by  its 
past  career,  can  be  expected  to  move  in  the  direction 
of  firmer  structure  and  clearer  outline.  After  all  she 
has  written  but  three  novels  and  it  is  not  to  be  won- 
dered at  that  they  all  have  about  them  certain  of  the 
graceful  angularities  of  an  art  not  yet  complete. 
0  Pioneers!  contains  really  two  stories;  The  Song  of 
the  Larky  though  Miss  Gather  cut  away  an  entire  sec- 
tion a,t  the  end,  does  not  maintain  itself  throughout 
at  the  full  pitch  of  interest;  the  introduction  to  My 
Antonia  is  largely  superfluous.  Having  freed  herself 
from  the  bondage  of  "plot"  as  she  has  freed  herself 
from  an  inheritance  of  the  softer  sentiments,  Miss 
Gather  has  learned  that  the  ultimate  interest  of  fiction 
inheres  in  character.  It  is  a  question  whether  she  can 
ever  reach  the  highest  point  of  which  she  shows  signs 
of  being  capable  unless  she  makes  up  her  mind  that 
it  is  as  important  to  find  the  precise  form  for  the 


122  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

representation  of  a  memorable  character  as  it  is  to 
find  the  precise  word  for  the  expression  of  a  memorable 
idea.  At  present  she  pleads  that  if  she  must  sacrifice 
something  she  would  rather  it  were  form  than  reality. 
If  she  desires  sufficiently  she  can  have  both. 

I 
5.     JOSEPH  HERGESHEIMER 

Joseph  Hergesheimer  employs  his  creative  strategy 
over  the  precarious  terrain  of  the  decorative  arts,  some 
of  his  work  lying  on  each  side  of  the  dim  line  which 
separates  the  most  consummate  artifice  of  which  the 
hands  of  talent  are  capable  from  the  essential  art  which 
springs  naturally  from  the  instincts  of  genius.  On 
the  side  of  artifice,  certainly,  lie  several  of  the  shorter 
stories  in  Gold  and  Iron  and  The  Happy  End,  for 
which,  he  declares,  his  grocer  is  as  responsible  as  any 
one;  and  on  the  side  of  art,  no  less  certainly,  lie  at 
least  Java  Head,  in  which  artifice,  though  apparent 
now  and  then,  repeatedly  surrenders  the  field  to  an  art 
which  is  admirably  authentic,  and  Linda  Condon, 
nearly  the  most  beautiful  American  novel  since  Haw- 
thorne and  Henry  James. 

Standing  thus  in  a  middle  ground  between  art  and 
artifice  Mr.  Hergesheimer  stands  also  in  a  middle 
ground  between  the  unrelieved  realism  of  the  newer 
school  of  American  fiction  and  the  genteel  moralism 
of  the  older.  "I  had  been  spared,"  he  says  with  regard 
to  moralism,  "the  dreary  and  impertinent  duty  of  im- 
proving the  world;  the  whole  discharge  of  my  respon- 


ART  123 

sibility  was  contained  in  the  imperative  obligation  to 
see  with  relative  truth,  to  put  down  the  colors  and 
scents  and  emotions  of  existence."  And  with  regard  to 
realism:  "If  I  could  put  on  paper  an  apple  tree  rosy 
with  blossom,  someone  else  might  discuss  the  economy 
of  the  apples." 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  does  not,  of  course,  merely  blun- 
der into  beauty;  his  methods  are  far  from  being  acci- 
dental ;  by  deliberate  aims  and  principles  he  holds  him- 
self close  to  the  regions  of  the  decorative.  He  likes 
the  rococo  and  the  Victorian,  ornament  without  any 
obvious  utility,  grace  without  any  busy  function.  He 
refuses  to  feel  confident  that  the  passing  of  elegant 
privilege  need  be  a  benefit:  "A  maze  of  clipped  box, 
old  emerald  sod,  represented  a  timeless  striving  for 
superiority,  for,  at  least,  the  illusion  of  triumph  over 
the  littorals  of  slime;  and  their  destruction  in  waves 
of  hysteria,  sentimentality,  and  envy  was  immeasur- 
ably disastrous."  For  himself  he  clings  sturdily,  ar- 
dently, to  loveliness  wherever  he  finds  it — preferring, 
however,  its  richer,  its  elaborated  forms. 

To  borrow  an  antithesis  remarked  by  a  brilliant 
critic  in  the  work  of  Amy  Lowell,  Mr.  Hergesheimer 
seems  at  times  as  much  concerned  with  the  stuffs  as 
with  the  stuff  of  life.  His  landscapes,  his  interiors, 
his  costumes  he  sets  forth  with  a  profusion  of  exquisite 
details  which  gives  his  texture  the  semblance  of  brocade 
— always  gorgeous  but  now  and  then  a  little  stiff  with 
its  splendors  of  silk  and  gold.  An  admitted  personal 
inclination  to  "the  extremes  of  luxury"  struggles  in 


124?  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  with  an  artistic  passion  for  "words 
as  disarmingly  simple  as  the  leaves  of  spring — as  simple 
and  as  lovely  in  pure  color — about  the  common  experi- 
ence of  life  and  death" ;  and  more  than  anything  else 
this  conflict  explains  the  presence  in  all  but  his  finest 
work  of  occasional  heavy  elements  which  weight  it 
down  and  the  presence  in  his  most  popular  narratives 
of  a  constant  lift  of  beauty  and  lucidity  which  will  not 
let  them  sag  into  the  average. 

One  comes  tolerably  close  to  the  secret  of  Mr. 
Hergesheimer's  career  by  perceiving  that,  with  an  ad- 
mirable style  of  which  he  is  both  conscious  and — very 
properly — proud,  he  has  looked  luxuriously  through 
the  world  for  subjects  which  his  style  will  fit.  Par- 
ticularly has  he  emancipated  himself  from  bondage  to 
nook  and  corner.  The  small  inland  towns  of  The  Lay 
Anthony,  the  blue  Virginia  valleys  of  Mountain  Blood, 
the  evolving  Pennsylvania  iron  districts  of  The  Three 
Black  Pennys,  the  antique  Massachusetts  of  Java 
Head,  the  fashionable  hotels  and  houses  of  Linda 
Condon,  the  scattered  exotic  localities  of  the  short 
stories — in  all  these  Mr.  Hergesheimer  is  at  home  with 
the  cool  insouciance  of  genius,  at  home  as  he  could 
not  be  without  an  erudition  founded  in  the  keenest 
observation  and  research. 

At  the  same  time,  he  has  not  satisfied  himself  with 
the  bursting  catalogues  of  some  types  of  naturalism. 
"The  individuality  of  places  and  hours  absorbed  me 
.  .  .  the  perception  of  the  inanimate  moods  of  place. 
,  ,  .  Certainly  houses  and  night  and  hills  were  often 


ART  125 

more  vivid  to  me  than  the  people  in  or  out  of  them." 
He  has  loved  the  scenes  wherein  his  events  are  trans- 
acted; he  has  brooded  over  their  moods,  their  signifi- 
cances. Neither  pantheistic,  however,  nor  very  specu- 
lative, Mr.  Hergesheimer  does  not  endow  places  with  a 
half-divine,  a  half-satanic  sentience;  instead  he  works 
more  nearly  in  the  fashion  of  his  master  Turgenev, 
or  of  Flaubert,  scrutinizing  the  surfaces  of  landscapes 
and  cities  and  human  habitations  until  they  gradually 
reveal  what — for  the  particular  observer — is  the  es- 
sence of  their  charm  or  horror,  and  come,  obedient  to 
the  evoking  imagination,  into  the  picture. 

Substantial  as  Mr.  Hergesheimer  makes  his  scene  by 
a  masterful  handling  of  locality,  he  goes  still  further, 
adds  still  another  dimension,  by  his  equally  masterful 
handling  of  the  past  as  an  element  in  his  microcosm. 
"There  was  at  least  this  to  be  said  for  what  I  had,  in 
writing,  laid  back  in  point  of  time — no  one  had  charged 
me  with  an  historical  novel,"  he  boasts.  Readers  in 
general  hardly  notice  how  large  a  use  of  history  ap- 
pears in,  for  instance,  The  Three  Black  Pennys  and 
Java  Head.  The  one  goes  as  far  back  as  to  colonial 
Pennsylvania  for  the  beginning  of  its  chronicle  and  the 
other  as  far  as  to  Salem  in  the  days  of  the  first  clipper 
ship;  and  yet  by  no  paraphernalia  of  languid  airs  or 
archaic  idioms  or  strutting  heroics  does  either  of  the 
novels  fall  into  the  orthodox  historical  tradition.  They 
have  the  vivid,  multiplied  detail  of  a  contemporary 
record.  And  this  is  the  more  notable  for  the  reason 
that  the  characters  in  each  of  them  stand  against  the 


126  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

background  of  a  highly  technical  profession — that  of 
iron-making  through  three  generations,  that  of  ship- 
ping under  sail  to  all  the  quarters  of  the  earth.  The 
wharves  of  Mr.  Hergesheimer's  Salem,  the  furnaces  of 
his  Myrtle  Forge,  are  thick  with  accurate,  pungent, 
delightful  facts. 

If  he  has  explored  the  past  in  a  deliberate  hunt  for 
picturesque  images  of  actuality  with  which  to  incrust 
his  narrative,  and  has  at  times — particularly  in  The 
Three  Black  Pennys — given  it  an  exaggerated  patina, 
nevertheless  he  has  refused  to  yield  himself  to  the  mere 
spell  of  the  past  and  has  regularly  subdued  its  "colors 
and  scents  and  emotions"  to  his  own  purposes.  His 
materials  may  be  rococo,  but  not  his  use  of  them.  The 
conflict  between  his  personal  preference  for  luxury 
and  his  artistic  passion  for  austerity  shows  itself  in 
his  methods  with  history :  though  the  historical  periods 
which  interest  him  are  bounded,  one  may  say,  by  the 
minuet  and  the  music-box,  he  permits  the  least  possible 
contagion  of  prettiness  to  invade  his  plots.  They  are 
fresh  and  passionate,  simple  and  real,  however  elabo- 
rate their  trappings.  With  the  fullest  intellectual 
sophistication,  Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  artistically  the 
courage  of  naivete.  He  subtracts  nothing  from  the 
common  realities  of  human  character  when  he  displays 
it  in  some  past  age,  but  preserves  it  intact.  The 
charming  erudition  of  his  surfaces  is  added  to  reality, 
not  substituted  for  it. 

Without  question  the  particular  triumph  of  these 
novels  is  the  women  who  appear  in  them.  Decorative 


ART  127 

art  in  fiction  has  perhaps  never  gone  farther  than  with 
Taou  Yuen,  the  marvelous  Manchu  woman  brought 
home  from  Shanghai  to  Salem  as  wife  of  a  Yankee 
skipper  in  Java  Head.  She  may  be  taken  as  focus  and 
symbol  of  Mr.  Hergesheimer's  luxurious  inclinations. 
By  her  bewildering  complexity  of  costume,  by  her  intri- 
cate ceremonial  observances,  by  the  impenetrability  of 
her  outward  demeanor,  she  belongs  rather  to  art  than 
to  life — an  Oriental  Galatea  radiantly  adorned  but  not 
wholly  metamorphosed  from  her  native  marble.  Only 
at  intervals  does  some  glimpse  or  other  come  of  the 
tender  flesh  shut  up  in  her  magnificent  garments  or  of 
the  tender  spirit  schooled  by  flawless,  immemorial  dis- 
cipline to  an  absolute  decorum.  That  such  glimpses 
come  just  preserves  her  from  appearing  a  mere  figure 
of  tapestry,  a  fine  mechanical  toy.  The  Salem  which 
before  her  arrival  seems  quaintly  formal  enough  imme- 
diately thereafter  seems  by  contrast  raw  and  new,  and 
her  beauty  glitters  like  a  precious  gem  in  some  plain 
man's  house. 

Much  the  same  effect,  on  a  less  vivid  scale,  is  pro- 
duced in  The  Three  Black  Pennys  by  the  presence  on 
the  Pennsylvania  frontier — it  is  almost  that — of  Ludo- 
wika  Winscombe,  who  has  always  lived  at  Court  and 
who  brings  new  fragrances,  new  dainty  rites,  into  the 
forest ;  and  in  Mountain  Blood  by  the  presence  among 
the  Appalachian  highlands  of  that  ivory,  icy  meretrix 
Meta  Beggs  who  plans  to  drive  the  best  possible  bar- 
gain for  her  virgin  favors.  Meta  carries  the  decora- 
tive traits  of  Mr.  Hergesheimer's  women  to  the  point 


128  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

at  which  they  suggest  the  marionette  too  much;  by  his 
methods,  of  course,  he  habitually  runs  the  risk  of  leav- 
ing the  flesh  and  blood  out  of  his  women.  He  leaves 
out,  at  least,  with  no  fluttering  compunctions,  any 
special  concern  for  the  simpler  biological  aspects  of 
the  sex:  "It  was  not  what  the  woman  had  in  common 
with  a  rabbit  that  was  important,  but  her  difference. 
On  one  hand  that  difference  was  moral,  but  on  the 
other  aesthetic ;  and  I  had  been  absorbed  by  the  latter." 
"I  couldn't  get  it  into  my  head  that  loveliness,  which 
had  a  trick  of  staying  in  the  mind  at  points  of  death 
when  all  service  was  forgotten,  was  rightly  considered 
to  be  of  less  importance  than  the  sweat  of  some  kitchen 
drudge." 

Such  robust  doctrine  is  a  long  way  from  the  custo- 
mary sentimentalism  of  novelists  about  maids,  wives, 
mothers,  and  widows.  Indeed,  Mr.  Hergesheimer,  like 
Poe  before  him,  inclines  very  definitely  toward  beauty 
rather  than  toward  humanity,  where  distinctions  may 
be  drawn  between  them.  In  Linda  Condon,  however, 
his  most  remarkable  creation,  he  has  brought  humanity 
and  beauty  together  in  an  intimate  fusion.  Less  exotic 
than  Taou  Yuen,  Linda,  with  her  straight  black  bang 
and  her  extravagant  simplicity  of  taste,  is  no  less 
exquisite.  And  like  Taou  Yuen  she  affords  Mr. 
Hergesheimer  the  opportunity  he  most  desires — "to 
realize  that  sharp  sense  of  beauty  which  came  from  a 
firm,  delicate  consciousness  of  certain  high  pretensions, 
valors,  maintained  in  the  face  of  imminent  destruc- 
tion. ...  In  that  category  none  was  sharper  than  the 


ART  129 

charm  of  a  woman,  soon  to  perish,  in  a  vanity  of  array 
as  momentary  and  iridescent  as  a  May-fly."  It  is  as 
the  poet  musing  upon  the  fleet  passage  of  beauty 
rather  than  as  the  satirist  mocking  at  the  vanity  of 
human  wishes  that  Mr.  Hergesheimer  traces  the  career 
of  Linda  Condon;  but  both  poet  and  satirist  meet  in 
his  masterpiece. 

A  woman  as  lovely  as  a  lyric,  she  is  almost  as  in- 
sensible as  a  steel  blade  or  a  bright  star.  The  true 
marvel  is  that  beauty  so  cold  can  provoke  such  confla- 
grations. Granted — and  certain  subtle  women  decline 
to  grant  it — that  Linda  with  her  shining  emptiness 
could  have  kindled  the  passion  she  kindles  in  the  story, 
what  must  be  the  blackness  of  her  discovery  that  when 
her  beauty  goes  she  will  have  left  none  of  the  generous 
affection  which,  had  she  herself  given  it  through  life, 
she  might  by  this  time  have  earned  in  quantities  suffi- 
cient to  endow  and  compensate  her  for  old  age!  Mr. 
Hergesheimer  does  not  soften  the  blow  when  it  comes — 
he  even  adds  to  her  agony  the  clear  consciousness  that 
she  cannot  feel  her  plight  as  more  passionate  natures 
might.  But  he  allows  her,  at  the  last,  an  intimation 
of  immortality.  From  her  unresponding  beauty,  she 
sees,  her  sculptor  lover  has  caught  a  madness  eventu- 
ally sublimated  to  a  Platonic  vision  which,  partially 
forgetful  of  her  as  an  individual,  has  made  him  and 
his  works  great.  Without,  in  the  common  way,  model- 
ing her  at  all,  he  has  snared  the  essence  of  her  spirit 
and  has  set  it — as  such  mortal  things  go — everlast- 
ingly in  bronze. 


130  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

If  Mr.  Hergesheimer  offers  Linda  in  the  end  only 
the  hard  comfort  of  a  perception  come  at  largely 
through  her  intellect,  still  as  far  as  the  art  of  his  novel 
is  concerned  he  has  immensely  gained  by  his  refusal 
to  make  any  trivial  concession  to  natural  weaknesses. 
His  latest  conclusion  is  his  best.  The  Lay  Anthony 
ends  in  accident,  Mountain  Blood  in  melodrama;  The 
Three  Black  Pennys,  more  successful  than  its  prede- 
cessors, fades  out  like  the  Penny  line ;  Java  Head  turns 
sharply  away  from  its  central  theme,  almost  as  if 
Hamlet  should  concern  itself  during  a  final  scene  with 
Horatio's  personal  perplexities.  Now  the  conclusions 
of  a  novelist  are  on  the  whole  the  test  of  his  judgment 
and  his  honesty ;  and  it  promises  much  for  fiction  that 
Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  advanced  so  steadily  in  this  re- 
spect through  his  seven  books. 

He  has  advanced,  too,  in  his  use  of  decoration,  which 
reached  its  most  sumptuous  in  Java  Head  and  which  in 
Linda  Condon  happily  began  to  show  a  more  austere 
control.  The  question  which  criticism  asks  is  whether 
Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  not  gone  as  far  as  a  practitioner 
of  the  decorative  arts  can  go,  and  whether  he  ought 
not,  during  the  remainder  of  the  eminent  career  which 
awaits  him,  to  work  rather  in  the  direction  marked  by 
Lmda  Condon  than  in  that  marked  by  Java  Head. 
The  rumor  that  his  friends  advise  him  to  become  a 
"period  novelist"  must  disquiet  his  admirers — even 
those  among  them  who  cannot  think  him  likely  to  act 
upon  advice  so  dangerous  to  his  art.  Doubtless  he 
could  go  on  and  write  another  Salammbo,  but  he  does 


ART  131 

not  need  to :  he  has  already  written  Java  Head.  When 
a  novelist  has  reached  the  limits  of  decoration  there 
still  stretches  out  before  him  the  endless  road — which 
Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  given  evidence  that  he  can  travel 
— of  the  interpretation  and  elucidation  of  human 
character  and  its  devious  fortunes  in  the  world. 


CHAPTER  IV 

NEW  STYLE 

1.     EMERGENT  TYPES 

EUen  Glasgow 

Fiction,  no  less  than  life,  has  its  broad  flats  and 
shallows  from  which  distinction  emerges  only  now  and 
then,  when  some  superior  veracity  or  beauty  or  energy 
lifts  a  novelist  or  a  novel  above  the  mortal  average. 
Consider,  for  example,  the  work  of  Ellen  Glasgow. 
In  her  representations  of  contemporary  Virginia  she 
long  stood  with  the  local  colorists,  practising  with  more 
grace  than  strength  what  has  come  to  seem  an  older 
style ;  in  her  heroic  records  of  the  Virginia  of  the  Civil 
War  and  Reconstruction  she  frequently  fell  into  the 
orthodox  monotone  of  the  historical  romancers.  By 
virtue  of  two  noticeable  qualities,  however,  she  has  in 
her  later  books  emerged  from  the  level  established  by 
the  majority  and  has  ranged  herself  with  writers  who 
seem  newer  and  fresher  than  her  early  models. 

One  quality  is  her  sense  for  the  texture  of  life, 
which  imparts  to  The  Miller  of  Old  Church  a  thickness 
of  atmosphere  decisively  above  that  of  most  local  color 
novels.  She  has  admitted  into  her  story  various  classes 

132 


NEW  STYLE  133 

of  society  which  traditional  Virginia  fiction  regularly 
neglects ;  she  has  enriched  her  narrative  with  fresh  and 
sweet  descriptions  of  the  soft  Virginia  landscape;  she 
has  bound  her  plot  together  with  the  best  of  all  liga- 
tures— intelligence.  If  certain  of  her  characters — 
Abel  Revercomb,  Reuben  Merryweather,  Betsey  Bottom 
— seem  at  times  a  little  too  much  like  certain  of  Thomas 
Hardy's  rustics,  still  the  resemblance  is  hardly  greater 
than  that  which  actually  exists  between  parts  of  rural 
Virginia  and  rural  Wessex ;  Miss  Glasgow  is  at  least  as 
faithful  to  her  scene  as  if  she  had  devoted  herself  solely 
to  a  chronicle  of  rich  planters,  poor  whites,  and  obei- 
sant  freedmen.  Without  any  important  sacrifice  of 
reality  she  has  enlarged  her  material  by  lifting  it 
toward  the  plane  of  the  pastoral  and  rounding  it  out 
with  poetic  abundance  instead  of  whittling  it  down 
with  provincial  shrewdness  or  weakening  it  with  village 
sentimentalism. 

That  she  does  not  lack  shrewdness  appears  from  the 
evidences  in  Life  and  Gabrietta  and  still  more  in  Vir- 
ginia of  her  second  distinctive  quality — a  critical  atti- 
tude toward  the  conventions  of  her  locality.  In  one 
Miss  Glasgow  exhibits  a  modern  Virginia  woman  break- 
ing her  medieval  shell  in  New  York;  in  the  other  she 
examines  the  subsequent  career  of  a  typical  Southern 
heroine  launched  into  life  with  no  equipment  but  loveli- 
ness and  innocence.  Loveliness,  Virginia  finds,  may 
fade  and  innocence  may  become  a  nuisance  if  wisdom 
happens  to  be  needed.  She  fails  to  understand  and 
eventually  to  "hold"  her  husband;  she  gives  herself  so 


134  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

completely  to  her  children  that  in  the  end  she  has 
nothing  left  for  herself  and  is  tragically  dispensable 
to  them.  Virginia  is  at  once  the  most  thorough  and  the 
most  pathetic  picture  extant  of  the  American  woman 
as  Victorianism  conceived  and  shaped  and  misfitted 
her.  But  the  book  is  much  more  than  a  tract  for 
feminism  to  point  to:  it  is  unexpectedly  full  and  civil- 
ized, packed  with  observation,  tinctured  with  omen  and 
irony. 

Wtiliam  Allen  White 

If  Miss  Glasgow  emerges  considerably — though  not 
immensely — above  the  deadly  levels  of  fiction,  so  does 
William  Allen  White.  What  lifts  him  is  his  hearty, 
bubbling  energy.  He  has  the  courage  of  all  his  con- 
victions, of  all  his  sentiments,  of  all  his  laughter,  of 
all  his  tears.  He  has  a  multitude  of  right  instincts  and 
sound  feelings,  and  he  habitually  reverts  to  them  in  the 
intervals  between  his  stricter  hours  of  thought.  Such 
stricter  hours  he  is  far  from  lacking.  They  address 
themselves  especially  to  the  task  of  showing  why  and 
how  corruption  works  in  politics  and  of  tracing  those 
effects  of  private  greed  which  ruin  souls  and  torture 
societies.  The  hero-villains  of  A  Certam  Rich  Man 
and  of  In  the  Heart  of  a  Fool  tread  all  the  paths  of 
selfishness  and  come  to  hard  ends  in  punishment  for 
the  offense  of  counting  the  head  higher  than  the  heart. 

These  books  being  crowded  with  quite  obvious  doc- 
trine it  is  fair  to  say  of  them  that  they  directly  incul- 
cate the  life  of  simple  human  virtues  and  services  and 


NEW  STYLE  135 

accuse  the  grosser  American  standards  of  success. 
They  do  this  important  thing  within  the  limits  of 
moralism,  progressivism,  and  optimism.  John  Barclay, 
the  rich  man,  when  his  evil  course  is  run,  hastily,  un- 
convincingly  divests  himself  of  his  spoils  and  loses  his 
life  in  an  heroic  accident.  Thomas  Van  Dorn,  the  fool, 
finally  arrives  at  desolation  because  there  has  been  no 
God  in  his  heart,  but  he  has  no  more  instructive  back- 
ground for  a  contrast  to  folly  than  the  spectacle  of  a 
nation  entering  the  World  War  with  what  is  here 
regarded  as  a  vast  purgation,  a  magnificent  assertion 
of  the  divinity  in  mankind.  How  such  a  conclusion 
withers  in  the  light  and  fire  of  time!  Right  instincts 
and  sound  feelings  are  not,  after  all,  enough  for  a 
novelist:  somewhere  in  his  work  there  must  appear  an 
intelligence  undiverted  by  even  the  kindliest  intentions ; 
much  as  he  must  be  of  his  world,  he  must  be  also  in 
some  degree  outside  it  as  well  as  above  it. 

Yet  to  be  of  his  world  with  such  knowledge  as  Mr. 
White  has  of  Kansas  gives  him  one  kind  of  distinction 
if  not  a  different  kind.  His  two  longer  narratives 
sweep  epically  down  from  the  days  of  settlement  to  the 
time  when  the  frontier  order  disappeared  under  the 
pressure  of  change.  He  has  a  moving  erudition  in  the 
history  and  characters  and  motives  and  humors  of 
the  small  inland  town;  no  one  has  ever  known  more 
about  the  outward  customs  and  behaviors  of  an  Ameri- 
can state  than  Mr.  White.  His  shorter  stories  not  less 
than  his  novels  are  racy  with  actualities :  he  has  caught 
the  dialect  of  his  time  and  place  with  an  ear  that  is 


186  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

singularly  exact;  he  has  cut  the  costumes  of  his  men 
and  villages  so  that  hardly  a  wrinkle  shows.  In  par- 
ticular he  understands  the  pathos  of  boyhood,  seen  not 
so  much,  however,  through  the  serious  eyes  of  boys 
themselves  as  through  the  eyes  of  reminiscent  men 
reflecting  upon  young  joys  and  griefs  that  will  shortly 
be  left  behind  and  upon  little  pomps  that  can  never 
come  to  anything.  The  Court  of  Boyville  is  now  hilari- 
ously comic,  now  tenderly  elegiac.  None  of  Mr. 
White's  contemporaries  has  quite  his  power  to  shift 
from  bursts  of  laughter  to  sudden,  agreeable  tears. 
That  flood  of  moods  and  words  upon  which  he  can 
be  swept  beyond  the  full  control  of  his  analytical  fac- 
ulties is  but  a  symptom  of  the  energy  which,  when  he 
turns  to  narrative,  sweeps  him  and  his  readers  out  of 
pedestrian  gaits. 

Ernest  Poole 

By  comparison  the  more  critical  Ernest  Poole  suffers 
from  a  deficiency  of  both  verve  and  humor.  He  began 
his  career  with  the  happy  discovery  of  a  picturesque, 
untrodden  neighborhood  of  New  York  City  in  The 
Harbor;  he  consolidated  his  reputation  with  the 
thoughtful  study  of  a  troubled  father  of  troubling 
daughters  in  His  Family;  since  then  he  has  sounded  no 
new  chords,  strumming  on  his  instrument  as  if  magic 
had  deserted  him.  Perhaps  it  was  not  quite  magic  by 
which  his  work  originally  won  its  hearing.  There  is 
something  a  little  unmagical,  a  little  mechanical,  about 
the  fancy  which  personifies  the  harbor  of  New  York 


NEW  STYLE  137 

and  makes  it  recur  and  reverberate  throughout  that 
first  novel.  The  matter  was  significant,  but  the  manner 
seems  only  at  times  spontaneous  and  at  times  only  in- 
dustrious. Intelligence,  ideas,  observations,  percep- 
tion— these  hold  up  well  in  The  Harbor;  it  is  poetry 
that  flags,  though  poetry  is  invoked  to  carry  out  the 
pattern.  Over  humor  Mr.  Poole  has  but  moderate 
power,  as  he  has  perhaps  but  moderate  interest  in  it: 
his  characters  are  themselves  either  fiercely  or  sadly 
serious,  and  they  are  seen  with  an  eye  which  has  not 
quite  the  forgiveness  of  laughter  or  the  pity  of  dis- 
illusion. Roger  Gale  in  His  Family  broods,  mystified, 
over  what  seems  to  him  the  drift  of  his  daughters  into 
the  furious  currents  of  a  new  age.  Yet  they  fall  into 
three  categories — with  some  American  reservations — 
of  mother,  nun,  courtesan,  about  which  there  is  noth- 
ing new;  and  all  the  tragic  elements  of  the  book  are 
almost  equally  ancient.  Without  the  spacious  vision 
which  sees  eternities  in  hours  His  Family  contents  it- 
self too  much  with  being  a  document  upon  a  particu- 
lar hour  of  history.  It  has  more  kindliness  than  criti- 
cism. 

Mr.  Poole,  one  hates  to  have  to  say,  is  frequently 
rather  less  than  serious:  he  is  earnest;. at  moments  he 
is  hardly  better  than  merely  solemn.  Nevertheless, 
The  Harbor  and  His  Family — His  Family  easily  the 
better  of  the  two — are  works  of  honest  art  and  excel- 
lent documents  upon  a  generation.  Mr.  Poole  feels  the 
earth  reeling  beneath  the  desperate  feet  of  men ;  he  sees 
the  millions  who  are  hopelessly  bewildered;  he  hears 


138  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

the  cries  of  rage  and  fear  coming  from  those  who  fore- 
tell chaos ;  he  catches  the  exaltation  of  those  who  im- 
agine that  after  so  long  a  shadow  the  sunshine  of  free- 
dom and  justice  will  shortly  break  upon  them.  With 
many  generous  expectations  he  waits  for  the  revolu- 
tion which  shall  begin  the  healing  of  the  world's  wounds. 
Meanwhile  he  paints  the  dissolving  lineaments  of  the 
time  in  colors  which  his  own  softness  keeps  from  being 
very  stern  or  very  deep  but  which  are  gentle  and 
appealing. 

Henry  B.  Fuller 

The  peculiar  strength  and  the  peculiar  weakness  of 
Henry  B.  Fuller  lie  in  his  faithful  habit  of  being  a 
dilettante.  A  generation  ago,  when  the  aesthetic  poets 
and  critics  were  in  bloom,  Mr.  Fuller  in  The  Chevalier 
of  Pensieri-Vani  and  The  Chatelaine  of  La  Trmite 
played  with  sentimental  pilgrimages  in  Italy  or  the 
Alps,  packing  his  narratives  with  the  most  affectionate 
kind  of  archaeology  and  yet  forever  scrutinizing  them 
with  a  Yankee  smile.  A  little  later,  when  Howells's  fol- 
lowers had  become  more  numerous,  Mr.  Fuller  joined 
them  with  minute,  accurate,  amused  representations 
of  Chicago  in  The  Cliff-Dwetters  and  With  the  Pro- 
cession. Then,  as  if  bored  with  longer  flights,  he  set- 
tled himself  to  writing  sharp-eyed  stories  concerning 
the  life  of  art  as  conducted  in  Chicago — Under  the 
Skylights — and  of  Americans  traveling  in  Europe — 
From  the  Other  Side,  Waldo  Trench  and  Others. 
After  Spoon  River  Anthology  Mr.  Fuller  took  such 


NEW  STYLE  139 

hints  from  its  method  as  he  needed  in  the  pungent 
dramatic  sketches  of  Lines  Long  and  Short.  One  of 
these  sketches,  called  Postponement,  has  autobiogra- 
phy, it  may  be  guessed,  in  its  ironic,  wistful  record  of 
a  Midwestern  American  who  all  his  life  longed  and 
planned  to  live  in  Europe  but  who  found  himself  ready 
to  gratify  his  desire  only  in  the  dread  summer  of  1914, 
when  peace  departed  from  the  earth  to  stay  away,  he 
saw,  at  least  as  long  as  he  could  hope  to  live.  There 
is  the  note  of  intimate  experience,  if  not  of  autobiog- 
raphy, in  these  lucid  words  spoken  about  the  hero  of 
On  the  Stairs:  "he  wanted  to  be  an  artist  and  give 
himself  out;  he  wanted  to  be  a  gentleman  and  hold 
himself  in.  An  entangling,  ruinous  paradox." 

Fate,  if  not  fatalism,  has  kept  Mr.  Fuller,  this 
dreamer  about  old  lands,  always  resident  in  the  noisiest 
city  of  the  newest  land  and  always  less,  it  seems,  than 
thoroughly  expressive.  Had  there  been  more  passion 
in  his  constitution  he  might,  perhaps,  have  either  de- 
tached himself  from  Chicago  altogether  or  submerged 
himself  in  it  to  a  point  of  reconciliation.  But  passion 
is  precisely  what  Mr.  Fuller  seems  to  lack  or  to  be 
chary  of.  He  dwells  above  the  furies.  As  one  conse- 
quence his  books,  interesting  as  every  one  of  them  is, 
suffer  from  the  absence  of  emphasis.  His  utterance 
comes  in  the  tone  of  an  intelligent  drawl.  Spiritually 
in  exile,  he  lives  somewhat  unconcerned  with  the  drama 
of  existence  surrounding  him,  as  if  his  gaze  were  far- 
ther off.  Yet  though  deficiency  in  passion  has  made 
Mr.  Fuller  an  amateur,  it  has  allowed  him  the  longest 


140  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

tether  in  the  exercise  of  a  free,  penetrating  intelli- 
gence. He  is  not  lightly  jostled  out  of  his  equilibrium 
by  petty  irritations  or  swept  off  his  feet  by  those  tor- 
rents of  ready  emotion  which  sweep  through  popular 
fiction  by  their  own  momentum.  Whenever,  in  A 
Daughter  of  the  Middle  Border,  Hamlin  Garland 
brings  Mr.  Fuller  into  his  story,  there  is  communicated 
the  sense  of  a  vivid  intellect  somehow  keeping  its  coun- 
sel and  yet  throwing  off  rays  of  suggestion  and  illu- 
mination. 

Without  much  question  it  is  by  his  critical  faculties 
that  Mr.  Fuller  excels.  He  has  the  poetic  energy  to 
construct,  but  less  frequently  to  create.  Such  endow- 
ments invite  him  to  the  composition  of  memoirs.  He 
has,  indeed,  in  On  the  Stairs,  produced  the  memoirs,  in 
the  form  of  a  novel,  of  a  Chicagoan  who  could  never 
adapt  himself  to  his  native  habitat  and  who  gradually 
sees  the  control  of  life  slipping  out  of  his  hands  to 
those  of  other,  more  potent,  more  decisive,  less  divided 
men.  But  suppose  Mr.  Fuller  were  to  surrender  the 
ironic  veil  of  fiction  behind  which  he  has  preferred  to 
hide  his  own  spiritual  adventures!  Suppose  he  were 
avowedly  to  write  the  history  of  the  arts  and  letters  in 
Chicago !  Suppose  he  were,  rather  more  confidingly, 
to  trace  the  career  of  an  actual,  attentive  dilettante 
in  his  thunderous  town! 

Mary  Austin 

Criticism  perceives  in  Mary  Austin  the  certain  signs 
of  a  power  which,  for  reasons  not  entirely  clear,  has 


NEW  STYLE  141 

as  yet  failed  to  express  itself  completely  in  forms  of 
art.  She  herself  prefers  less  to  be  judged  by  any  of 
her  numerous  books  than  to  be  regarded  as  a  figure 
laboring  somewhat  anonymously  toward  the  develop- 
ment of  a  national  culture  founded  at  all  points  on 
national  realities.  Behind  this  preference  is  a  personal 
experience  which  must  be  taken  into  account  in  any 
analysis  of  Mrs.  Austin's  work.  Born  in  Illinois,  she 
went  at  twenty  to  California,  to  live  between  the  Sierra 
Nevada  and  the  Mohave  Desert.  There  she  was  soon 
spiritually  acclimated  to  the  wilderness,  studied  among 
the  Indians  the  modes  of  aboriginal  life,  and  in  time 
came  to  bear  the  relation  almost  of  a  prophetess  to 
the  people  among  whom  she  lived.  Her  first  book,  The 
Land  of  Little  Rain,  interpreted  the  desert  chiefly  as 
landscape.  Since  then  she  has,  it  may  be  said,  employed 
the  desert  as  a  measure  of  life,  constantly  bringing 
from  it  a  sense  for  the  primal  springs  of  existence  into 
all  her  comment  upon  human  affairs.  The  Man  Jesus 
examines  the  career  of  a  desert-dweller  who  preached 
a  desert-wisdom  to  a  confused  world.  Her  play  The 
Arrow  Maker  exhibits  the  behavior  and  fortunes  of  a 
desert-seer  ess  among  her  own  people.  Love  and  the 
Soul-Maker  anatomizes  love  as  a  primal  force  strug- 
gling with  and  through  civilization.  From  Paiute  and 
Shoshone  medicine  men,  the  only  poets  Mrs.  Austin 
knew  during  her  formative  years,  she  acquired  that 
grounding  in  basic  rhythms  which  led  her  to  write  free 
verse  years  before  it  became  the  fashion  in  sophisticated 
and  persuaded  her  that  American  poetry  cannot 


142  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

afford  to  overlook  the  experiments  and  successes  of  the 
first  American  poets  in  fitting  expression  to  the  actual 
conditions  of  the  continent. 

It  has  been  of  course  a  regular  tradition  among 
novelists  in  the  United  States  to  weigh  the  "settle- 
ments" in  a  balance  and  to  represent  them  as  lacking 
the  hardy  virtues  of  the  backwoods.  Mrs.  Austin  goes 
beyond  this  naive  process.  Whether  she  deals  with  the 
actual  frontier — as  in  Isidro  or  Lost  Borders  or  The 
Ford — or  with  more  crowded,  more  complex  regions — 
as  in  The  Woman  of  Genius  or  26  Jayne  Street — she 
keeps  her  particular  frontier  in  mind  not  as  an  entity 
or  a  dogma  but  as  a  symbol  of  the  sources  of  human 
life  and  society.  She  creates,  it  seems,  out  of  depths 
of  reflection  and  out  of  something  even  deeper  than 
reflection.  She  has  observed  the  unconscious  instincts 
of  the  individual  and  the  long  memories  of  the  race. 
The  effect  upon  her  novels  of  such  methods  has  been 
to  widen  their  sympathies  and  to  warm  and  lift  their 
style;  it  has  also  been  to  render  them  sometimes  de- 
fective in  structure  and  sometimes  obscure  in  meaning. 
If  they  are  not  glib,  neither  are  they  always  clean-cut 
or  direct.  Along  with  her  generous  intelligence  she  has 
a  good  deal  of  the  stubborn  wilfulness  of  genius,  and 
she  has  never  achieved  a  quite  satisfactory  fusion  of 
the  two  qualities.  She  wears  something  like  the  sibyl's 
robes  and  speaks  with  something  like  the  sibyl's  strong 
accents,  but  the  cool,  hard  discipline  of  the  artist  or 
of  the  exact  scholar  only  occasionally  serves  her.  Much 
of  her  significance  lies  in  her  promise.  Faithful  to  her 


NEW  STYLE  143 

original  vision,  she  has  moved  steadily  onward,  grow- 
ing1, writing1  no  book  like  its  predecessor,  applying  her 
wisdom  continually  to  new  knowledge,  leaving  behind 
her  a  rich  detritus  which  she  will  perhaps  be  willing 
to  consider  detritus  if  it  helps  to  nourish  subsequent 
generations. 

Immigrants 

The  newer  stocks  and  neighborhoods  in  the  United 
States  have  their  fictive  records  as  well  as  the  longer 
established  ones,  and  there  is  growing  up  a  class  of 
immigrant  books  which  amounts  almost  to  a  separate 
department  of  American  literature.  From  Denmark, 
Germany,  Czecho-Slovakia,  Poland,  Russia,  Rumania, 
Syria,  Italy  have  come  passionate  pilgrims  who  have  set 
down,  mostly  in  plain  narratives,  the  chronicles  of  their 
migration.  As  the  first  Americans  contended  with  na- 
ture and  the  savages,  so  these  late  arrivals  contend 
with  men  and  a  civilization  no  less  hostile  toward  them ; 
their  writings  continue,  in  a  way,  the  earliest  American 
tradition  of  a  concern  with  the  risks  and  contrivances 
by  which  pioneers  cut  their  paths.  Even  when  the  immi- 
grants write  fiction  they  tend  to  choose  the  same  mate- 
rials and  thus  to  fall  into  formulas,  which  are  the  more 
observable  since  the  writers  are  the  survivors  in  the 
struggle  and  naturally  tell  about  the  successes  rather 
than  the  failures  in  the  process  of  Americanization. 

Not  all  the  stocks,  of  course,  are  equally  interested 
in  fiction  or  gifted  at  it:  the  Russian  Jews  have  the 
most  notable  novels  to  their  credit.  Though  these  are 
generally  composed  by  men  not  born  in  this  country, 


144  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

in  Yiddish,  and  so  belong  to  the  history  of  that  most 
international  of  literatures,  certain  of  them,  having 
been  translated,  belong  obviously  as  well  as  actually 
to  the  common  treasure  of  the  nation.  Shalom  Aleich- 
em's  Jewish  Children  and  Leon  Kobrin's  A  Lithuanian 
Village  surely  belong,  though  their  scenes  are  laid  in 
Europe;  as  do  Sholom  Asch's  vivid,  moving  novels 
Mottke  the  Vagabond — concerned  with  the  underworld 
of  Poland — and  Uncle  Moses — concerned  with  the  New 
York  Ghetto — the  recent  translations  of  which  are 
slowly  bringing  to  a  wider  American  public  the  evidence 
that  a  really  eminent  novelist  has  hitherto  been  partly 
hidden  by  his  alien  tongue. 

There  is  no  question  whatever  that  the  work  of 
Abraham  Cahan,  Yiddish  scholar,  journalist,  novelist, 
belongs  to  the  American  nation.  As  far  back  as  the 
year  in  which  Stephen  Crane  stirred  many  sensibilities 
with  his  Maggie,  the  story  of  an  Irish  slum  in  Man- 
hattan, Mr.  Cahan  produced  in  YeJd  a  book  of  similar 
and  practically  equal  merit  concerning  a  Jewish  slum 
in  the  same  borough.  But  it  and  his  later  books  The 
Imported  Bridegroom  and  Other  Stories  and  The 
White  Terror  and  the  Red  have  been  overwhelmed  by 
novels  by  more  familiar  men  dealing  with  more  familiar 
communities.  The  same  has  been  true  even  of  his  mas- 
terpiece, the  most  important  of  all  immigrant  novels, 
The  Rise  of  David  Levinsky.  It,  too,  records  the  mak- 
ing of  an  American,  originally  a  reader  of  Talmud  in  a 
Russian  village  and  eventually  the  principal  figure  in 
the  cloak  and  suit  trade  in  America.  But  it  does 


NEW  STYLE  145 

more  than  trace  the  career  of  Levinsky  through  his 
personal  adventures :  it  traces  the  evolution  of  a  great 
industry  and  represents  the  transplanted  Russian  Jews 
with  affectionate  exactness  in  all  their  modes  of 
work  and  play  and  love — another  conquest  of  a  larger 
Canaan.  Here  are  fused  American  hope  and  Russian 
honesty.  At  the  end  David,  with  all  his  New  World 
wealth,  lacks  the  peace  he  might  have  had  but  for  his 
sacrifice  of  Old  World  integrity  and  faith.  And  yet 
the  novel  is  very  quiet  in  its  polemic.  Its  hero  has 
gained  in  power;  he  is  no  dummy  to  hang  maxims  on. 
Moving  through  a  varied  scene,  gradually  shedding 
the  outward  qualities  of  his  race,  he  remains  always 
an  individual,  gnawed  at  by  love  in  the  midst  of  his 
ambitions,  subject  to  frailties  which  test  his  strength. 
The  fact  that  Mr.  Cahan  wrote  David  Levmsky  not 
in  his  mother-tongue  but  in  the  language  of  his  adopted 
country  may  be  taken  as  a  sign  that  American  litera- 
ture no  less  than  the  American  population  is  being 
enlarged  by  the  influx  of  fresh  materials  and  methods. 
The  methods  of  the  Yiddish  writers  are,  as  might  be 
expected,  those  of  Russian  fiction  generally,  though  in 
this  they  were  anticipated  by  the  critical  arguments 
of  Howells  and  Henry  James  and  are  rivaled  by  the 
majority  of  the  naturalistic  novelists.  Their  materials, 
as  might  not  be  expected,  have  a  sort  of  primitive  power 
by  comparison  with  which  the  orthodox  native  mate- 
rials of  fiction  seem  often  pale  and  dusty.  The  older 
Americans,  settled  into  smug  routines,  lack  the  vitality, 
the  industry  of  the  newcomers.  They  are  less  direct 


146  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

and  more  provincial ;  they  are  bundled  up  in  gentilities 
and  petty  habits ;  they  hide  behind  old-fashioned  retic- 
ences which  soften  the  drama  of  their  lives.  With  the 
newer  stocks  an  ancient  process  begins  again.  Their 
affairs  are  conducted  on  the  plane  of  desperate  sub- 
sistence. Struggling  to  survive  at  all,  they  cry  out  in 
the  language  of  hunger  and  death ;  almost  naked  in  the 
struggle,  they  speak  nakedly  about  livelihood  and  birth 
and  death.  Sooner  or  later  the  immigrants  must  be 
perceived  to  have  added  precious  elements  of  passion 
and  candor  to  American  fiction. 


2.     THE  REVOLT  FROM  THE  VILLAGE 
Edgar  Lee  Masters 

The  newest  style  in  American  fiction  dates  from  the 
appearance,  in  1915,  of  Spoon  River  Anthology, 
though  it  required  five  years  for  the  influence  of  that 
book  to  pass  thoroughly  over  from  poetry  to  prose. 
For  nearly  half  a  century  native  literature  had  been 
faithful  to  the  cult  of  the  village,  celebrating  its  deli- 
cate merits  with  sentimental  affection  and  with  un- 
wearied interest  digging  into  odd  corners  of  the  coun- 
try for  persons  and  incidents  illustrative  of  the  essen- 
tial goodness  and  heroism  which,  so  the  doctrine  ran, 
lie  beneath  unexciting  surfaces.  Certain  critical  dis- 
positions, aware  of  agrarian  discontent  or  given  to  a 
preference  for  cities,  might  now  and  then  lay  disr«*- 


NEW  STYLE  147 

spectf ill  hands  upon  the  life  of  the  farm ;  but  even  these 
generally  hesitated  to  touch  the  village,  sacred  since 
Goldsmith  in  spite  of  Crabbe,  sacred  since  Washington 
Irving  in  spite  of  E.  W.  Howe. 

The  village  seemed  too  cosy  a  microcosm  to  be  dis- 
turbed. There  it  lay  in  the  mind's  eye,  neat,  compact, 
organized,  traditional:  the  white  church  with  tapering 
spire,  the  sober  schoolhouse,  the  smithy  of  the  ringing 
anvil,  the  corner  grocery,  the  cluster  of  friendly  houses ; 
the  venerable  parson,  the  wise  physician,  the  canny 
squire,  the  grasping  landlord  softened  or  outwitted  in 
the  end;  the  village  belle,  gossip,  atheist,  idiot;  jovial 
fathers,  gentle  mothers,  merry  children;  cool  parlors, 
shining  kitchens,  spacious  barns,  lavish  gardens,  fra- 
grant summer  dawns,  and  comfortable  winter  evenings. 
These  were  elements  not  to  be  discarded  lightly,  even 
by  those  who  perceived  that  time  was  discarding  many 
of  them  as  the  industrial  revolution  went  on  planting 
ugly  factories  alongside  the  prettiest  brooks,  bringing 
in  droves  of  aliens  who  used  unfamiliar  tongues  and 
customs,  and  fouling  the  atmosphere  with  smoke  and 
gasoline.  Mr.  Howe  in  The  Story  of  a  Country  Town 
had  long  ago  made  it  cynically  clear — to  the  few  who 
read  him — that  villages  which  prided  themselves  upon 
their  pioneer  energy  might  in  fact  be  stagnant  back- 
waters or  dusty  centers  of  futility,  where  existence 
went  round  and  round  while  elsewhere  the  broad  cur- 
rent moved  away  from  them.  Mark  Twain  in  The 
Man  That  Corrupted  Hadleyburg  had  more  recently 
put  it  bitterly  on  record  that  villages  which  prided 


148  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

themselves  upon  their  simple  virtues  might  from  lack 
of  temptation  have  become  a  hospitable  soil  for  mean- 
ness and  falsehood,  merely  waiting  for  the  proper  seed. 
And  Clarence  Darrow  in  his  elegiac  Farmmgton  had 
insisted  that  one  village  at  least  had  been  the  seat  of 
as  much  restless  longing  as  of  simple  bliss.  Spoon 
River  Anthology  in  its  different  dialect  did  little  more 
than  to  confirm  these  mordant,  neglected  testimonies. 

That  Mr.  Masters  was  not  neglected  must  be  ex- 
plained in  part,  of  course,  by  his  different  dialect.  The 
Greek  anthology  had  suggested  to  him  something  which 
was,  he  said,  "if  less  than  verse,  yet  more  than  prose'*; 
and  he  went,  with  the  step  of  genius,  beyond  any  "for- 
mal resuscitation  of  the  Greek  epigrams,  ironical  and 
tender,  satirical  and  sympathetic,  as  casual  experi- 
ments in  unrelated  themes,"  to  an  "epic  rendition  of 
modern  life"  which  suggests  the  novel  in  its  largest 
aspects.  An  admirable  scheme  occurred  to  him:  he 
would  imagine  a  graveyard  such  as  every  American 
village  has  and  would  equip  it  with  epitaphs  of  a  ruth- 
less veracity  such  as  no  village  ever  saw  put  into  words. 
The  effect  was  as  if  all  the  few  honest  epitaphs  in  the 
world  had  suddenly  come  together  in  one  place  and  sent 
up  a  shout  of  revelation. 

Conventional  readers  had  the  thrill  of  being  shocked 
and  of  finding  an  opportunity  to  defend  the  customary 
reticences ;  ironical  readers  had  the  delight  of  coming 
upon  a  host  of  witnesses  to  the  contrast  which  irony 
perpetually  observes  between  appearance  and  reality; 
readers  militant  for  the  "truth"  discovered  an  occasion 


NEW  STYLE  149 

to  demand  that  pious  fictions  should  be  done  away  with 
and  the  naked  facts  exposed  to  the  sanative  glare  of 
noon.  And  all  these  readers,  most  of  them  uncon- 
sciously no  doubt,  shared  the  fearful  joy  of  sitting 
down  at  an  almost  incomparably  abundant  feast  of 
scandal.  Where  now  were  the  mild  decencies  of  Tiver- 
ton,  of  Old  Chester,  of  Friendship  Village?  The  roofs 
and  walls  of  Spoon  River  were  gone  and  the  passers-by 
saw  into  every  bedroom;  the  closets  were  open  and  all 
the  skeletons  rattled  undenied;  brains  and  breasts  had 
unlocked  themselves  and  set  their  most  private  treas- 
ures out  for  the  most  public  gaze. 

It  was  the  scandal  and  not  the  poetry  of  Spoon 
River,  criticism  may  suspect,  which  particularly  spread 
its  fame.  Mr.  Masters  used  an  especial  candor  in  af- 
fairs of  sex,  an  instinct  which,  secretive  everywhere, 
has  rarely  ever  been  so  much  so  as  in  the  American 
villages  of  fiction,  where  love  ordinarily  exhibited  itself 
in  none  but  the  chastest  phases,  as  if  it  knew  no  savage 
vagaries,  transgressed  no  ordinances,  shook  no  souls 
out  of  the  approved  routines.  Reaction  from  too  much 
sweet  drove  Mr.  Masters  naturally  to  too  much  sour; 
sex  in  Spoon  River  slinks  and  festers,  as  if  it  were  an 
instinct  which  had  not  been  schooled — however  imper- 
fectly— by  thousands  of  years  of  human  society  to 
some  modification  of  its  rages  and  some  civil  direction 
of  its  restless  power.  But  here,  as  with  the  other  as- 
pects of  behavior  in  his  village,  he  showed  himself  im- 
patient, indeed  violent,  toward  all  subterfuges.  There 
is  filth,  he  said  in  effect,  behind  whited  sepulchers; 


150  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

drag  it  into  the  light  and  such  illusions  will  no 
longer  trick  the  uninstructed  into  paying  honor  where 
no  honor  appertains  and  will  no  longer  beckon  the  de- 
luded to  an  imitation  of  careers  which  are  actually 
unworthy. 

Spoon  River  has  not  even  the  outward  comeliness 
which  the  village  of  tradition  should  possess :  it  is  slack 
and  shabby.  Nor  is  its  decay  chronicled  in  any  mood 
of  tender  pathos.  What  strikes  its  chronicler  most  is 
the  general  demoralization  of  the  town.  Except  for  a 
few  saints  and  poets,  whom  he  acclaims  with  a  lyric 
ardor,  the  population  is  sunk  in  greed  and  hypocrisy 
and — as  if  this  were  actually  the  worst  of  all — com- 
placent apathy.  Spiritually  it  dwindles  and  rots;  ex- 
ternally it  clings  to  a  pitiless  decorum  which  veils  its 
faults  and  almost  makes  it  overlook  them,  so  great  has 
the  breach  come  to  be  between  its  practices  and  its  pro- 
fessions. Again  and  again  its  poet  goes  back  to  the 
heroic  founders  of  Spoon  River,  back  to  the  days  which 
nurtured  Lincoln,  whose  shadow  lies  mighty,  benefi- 
cent, too  often  unheeded,  over  the  degenerate  sons  and 
daughters  of  a  smaller  day;  and  from  an  older,  ro- 
buster  integrity  Mr.  Masters  takes  a  standard  by 
which  he  morosely  measures  the  purposelessness  and 
furtiveness  and  supineness  and  dulness  of  the  village 
which  has  forgotten  its  true  ancestors. 

Anger  like  his  springs  from  a  poetic  elevation  of 
spirit ;  toward  the  end  Spoon  River  Anthology  rises 
to  a  mystical  vision  of  human  life  by  comparison  with 
which  the  scavenging  epitaphs  of  the  first  half  seem, 


NEW  STYLE  151 

though  witty,  yet  insolent  and  trivial.  It  is  perhaps 
not  necessary  to  point  out  that  the  numerous  poets  and 
novelists  who  have  learned  a  lesson  from  the  book  have 
learned  it  less  powerfully  from  the  difficult  later  pages 
than  from  those  in  which  the  text  is  easiest. 

Mr.  Masters  himself  has  not  always  remembered  the 
harder  and  better  lesson.     During  a  half  dozen  years 
he  has  published  more  than  a  half  dozen  books  which 
have  all  inherited  the  credit  of  the  Anthology  but  which 
all  betray  the  turbulent,  nervous  habit  of  experimenta- 
tion which  makes   up   a   large   share   of  his   literary 
character.    There  comes  to  mind  the  figure  of  a  blind- 
folded Apollo,  eager  and  lusty,  who  continually  runs 
forward  on  the  trail  of  poetry  and  truth  but  who, 
because    of   his    blindfoldedness,    only   now    and   then 
strikes  the  central  track.    Five  of  Mr.  Masters's  later 
books   are   collections   of  miscellaneous   verse;   during 
the  fruitful  year  1920  he  undertook  two  longer  flights 
of  fiction.     In  Mitch  Miller  he  attempted  in  prose  to 
write  a  new  Tom  Sawyer  for  the  Spoon  River  district ; 
in  Domesday  Book  he  applied  the  method  of  The  Ring 
and  tlie  Book  to  the  material  of  Starved  Rock.     The 
impulse  of  the  first  must  have  been  much  the  same  as 
Mark  Twain's :  a  desire  to  catch  in  a  stouter  net  than 
memory  itself  the  recollections  of  boyhood  which  haunt 
disillusioned  men.     But  as  Mr.  Masters  is  immensely 
less  boylike  than  Mark  Twain,   elegy   and   argument 
thrust  themselves  into  the  chronicle  of  Mitch  and  Skeet, 
with   an   occasional   tincture   of   a   fierce   hatred   felt 
toward  the  politics  and  theology  of  Spoon  River.     A 


152  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

story  of  boyhood,  that  lithe,  muscular  age,  cannot 
carry  such  a  burden  of  doctrine.  The  narrative  is 
tangled  in  a  snarl  of  moods.  Its  movement  is  often 
thick,  its  wings  often  gummed  and  heavy. 

The  same  qualities  may  be  noted  in  Domesday  Book. 
Its  scheme  and  machinery  are  promising:  a  philosoph- 
ical coroner,  holding  his  inquest  over  the  body  of  a 
girl  found  mysteriously  dead,  undertakes  to  trace  the 
mystery  not  only  to  its  immediate  cause  but  up  to  its 
primary  source  and  out  to  its  remotest  consequences. 
At  times  the  tale  means  to  be  an  allegory  of  America 
during  the  troubled,  roiled,  destroying  years  of  the 
war;  at  times  it  means  to  be  a  "census  spiritual"  of 
American  society.  Elenor  Murray,  in  her  birth  and 
love  and  sufferings  and  desperate  end,  is  represented 
as  pure  nature,  "essential  genius,"  acting  out  its  fated 
processes  in  a  world  of  futile  or  corrupting  inhibitions. 
But  Mr.  Masters  has  less  skill  at  portraying  the  sheer 
genius  of  an  individual  than  at  arraigning  the  inhibi- 
tions of  the  individual's  society.  When  he  steps  down 
from  his  watch-tower  of  irony  he  can  hate  as  no  other 
American  poet  does.  His  hates,  however,  do  not  always 
pass  into  poetry;  they  too  frequently  remain  hard, 
sullen  masses  of  animosity  not  fused  with  his  narrative 
but  standing  out  from  it  and  adding  an  unmistakable 
personal  rhythm  to  the  rough  beat  of  his  verse.  So, 
too,  do  his  heaps  of  turgid  learning  and  his  scientific 
speculations  often  remain  undigested.  A  good  many 
of  his  characters  are  cut  to  fit  the  narrative  plan,  not 
chosen  from  reality  to  make  up  the  narrative.  The 


NEW  STYLE  153 

total  effect  is  often  crude  and  heavy;  and  yet  beneath 
these  uncompleted  surfaces  are  the  sinews  of  enormous 
power:  a  greedy  gusto  for  life,  a  wide  imaginative 
experience,  tumultuous  uprushes  of  emotion  and  ex- 
pression, an  acute  if  undisciplined  intelligence,  great 
masses  of  the  veritable  stuff  of  existence  out  of  which 
great  novels  are  made. 

Sherwood  Anderson 

Spoon  River  Anthology  has  called  forth  a  smaller 
number  of  deliberate  imitations  than  might  have  been 
expected,  and  even  they  have  utilized  its  method  with 
a  difference.  Sherwood  Anderson,  for  example,  in 
Winesburg,  Ohio  speaks  in  accents  and  rhythms  obsti- 
nately his  own,  though  his  book  is,  in  effect,  the  An- 
thology "transprosed."  Instead  of  inventing  Wines- 
burg  immediately  after  Spoon  River  became  famous 
he  began  his  career  more  regularly,  with  the  novels 
Windy  McPherson's  Son  and  Marching  Men,  in  which 
he  employed  what  has  become  the  formula  of  revolt  for 
recent  naturalism.  In  both  stories  a  superior  youth, 
of  rebellious  energy  and  somewhat  inarticulate  ambi- 
tion, detaches  himself  in  disgust  from  his  native  vil- 
lage and  makes  his  way  to  the  city  in  search  of  that 
wealth  which  is  the  only  thing  the  village  has  ever 
taught  him  to  desire  though  it  is  unable  to  gratify  his 
desires  itself ;  and  in  both  the  youth,  turned  man,  finds 
himself  sickening  with  his  prize  in  his  hands  and  looks 
about  him  for  some  clue  to  the  meaning  of  the  mad 


154  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

world  in  which  he  has  succeeded  without  satisfaction. 
Sam  McPherson,  after  a  futile  excursion  through  the 
proletariat  in  search  of  the  peace  which  he  has  heard 
accompanies  honest  toil,  settles  down  to  the  task  of 
bringing  up  some  children  he  has  adopted  and  thus  of 
forcing  himself  "back  into  the  ranks  of  life."  Beaut 
McGregor,  refusing  a  handsome  future  at  the  bar,  sets 
out  to  organize  the  workers  of  Chicago  into  marching 
men  who  drill  in  the  streets  and  squares  at  night  that 
they  may  be  prepared  for  action  if  only  they  can  find 
some  sort  of  goal  to  march  upon. 

These  novels  ache  with  the  sense  of  a  dumb  confu- 
sion in  America;  with  a  consciousness  "of  how  men, 
coming  out  of  Europe  and  given  millions  of  square 
miles  of  black  fertile  land  mines  and  forests,  have 
failed  in  the  challenge  given  them  by  fate  and  have 
produced  out  of  the  stately  order  of  nature  only  the 
sordid  disorder  of  man."  Out  of  this  ache  of  confu- 
sion comes  no  lucidity.  Sam  McPherson  is  not  sure 
but  that  he  will  find  parenthood  as  petty  as  business 
was  brutal ;  Beaut  McGregor  sets  his  men  to  marching 
and  their  orderly  step  resounds  through  the  final  chap- 
ters of  his  career  as  here  recorded,  but  no  one  knows 
what  will  come  of  it — they  advance  and  wheel  and  re- 
treat as  blindly  as  any  horde  of  peasants  bound  for  a 
war  about  which  they  do  not  know  the  causes,  in  a 
distant  country  of  which  they  have  never  heard  the 
name.  Mr.  Anderson  worked  in  his  first  books  as  if  he 
were  assembling  documents  on  the  eve  of  revolution. 
Village  peace  and  stability  have  departed ;  ancient  cus- 


NEW  STYLE  155 

toms  break  or  fade;  the  leaven  of  change  stirs  the 
lump. 

From  such  arguments  he  turned  aside  to  follow  Mr. 
Masters  into  verse  with  Mid-American  Chants  and  into 
scandal  with  Wwesburg,  Ohio.  But  touching  scandal 
with  beauty  as  his  predecessor  touched  it  with  irony, 
Mr.  Anderson  constantly  transmutes  it.  The  young 
man  who  here  sets  out  to  make  his  fortune  has  not 
greatly  hated  Winesburg,  and  the  imminence  of  his 
departure  throws  a  vaguely  golden  mist  over  the  vil- 
lage, which  is  seen  in  considerable  measure  through  his 
generous  if  inexperienced  eyes.  A  newspaper  reporter, 
he  directs  his  principal  curiosity  towards  items  of  life 
outside  the  commonplace  and  thus  offers  Mr.  Anderson 
the  occasion  to  explore  the  moral  and  spiritual  hinter- 
lands of  men  and  women  who  outwardly  walk  paths 
strict  enough. 

If  the  life  of  the  tribe  is  unadventurous,  he  seems  to 
say,  there  is  still  the  individual,  who,  perhaps  all  the 
more  because  of  the  rigid  decorums  forced  upon  him, 
may  adventure  with  secret  desires  through  pathless 
space.  Only,  the  pressure  of  too  many  inhibitions  can 
distort  human  spirits  into  grotesque  forms.  The  in- 
habitants of  Winesburg  tend  toward  the  grotesque, 
now  this  organ  of  the  soul  enlarged  beyond  all  symme- 
try, now  that  wasted  away  in  a  desperate  disuse. 
They  see  visions  which  in  some  wider  world  might  be- 
come wholesome  realities  or  might  be  dispelled  by  the 
light  but  which  in  Winesburg  must  lurk  about  till  they 
master  and  madden  with  the  strength  which  the  dark- 


156  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

ness  gives  them.  Religion,  deprived  in  Winesburg  of 
poetry,  fritters  its  time  away  over  Pharisaic  ordi- 
nances or  evaporates  in  cloudy  dreams;  sex,  deprived 
of  spontaneity,  settles  into  fleshly  habit  or  tortures  its 
victim  with  the  malice  of  a  thwarted  devil;  heroism 
of  deed  or  thought  either  withers  into  melancholy  inac- 
tion or  else  protects  itself  with  a  sullen  or  ridiculous 
bravado. 

Yet  even  among  such  pitiful  surroundings  Mr. 
Anderson  walks  tenderly.  He  honors  youth,  he  feels 
beauty,  he  understands  virtue,  he  trusts  wisdom,  when 
he  comes  upon  them.  He  broods  over  his  creatures  with 
affection,  though  he  makes  no  luxury  of  illusions. 
Much  as  he  has  detached  himself  from  the  cult  of  the 
village,  he  still  cherishes  the  memories  of  some  specific 
Winesburg.  Much  as  he  has  detached  himself  from 
the  hazy  national  optimism  of  an  elder  style  in 
American  thinking,  he  still  cherishes  a  confidence  in 
particular  persons.  Winesburg,  Ohio  springs  from 
the  more  intimate  regions  of  his  mind  and  is  conse- 
quently more  humane  and  less  doctrinaire  than  his 
earlier  novels.  It  has  a  similar  superiority  over  the 
book  he  wrote  for  1920,  Poor  White,  which  returns  to 
the  device  of  a  bewildered  strong  man  rising  from  a  dull 
obscurity,  successful  but  unsatisfied.  At  the  same 
time  Poor  White  proceeds  from  an  imagination  which 
had  been  warmed  with  the  creation  of  Winesburg  and 
its  people  and  is  richer,  fuller,  deeper  than  the  angular 
sagas  of  McPherson  and  McGregor.  It  does  not  yet 
show  that  Mr,  Anderson  can  construct  a  large  plot 


NEW  STYLE  157 

or  that  his  vision  comes  with  a  steady  gleam ;  it  shows, 
rather,  that  he  is  still  fumbling  in  the  confusion  of 
current  life  to  get  hold  of  something  true  and  simple 
and  to  make  it  clear. 

Perhaps  he  tried  in  Poor  White  to  manipulate  a 
larger  bulk  than  he  is  yet  ready  for.  Perhaps  because 
he  was  aware  of  that  he  has  worked  in  his  latest  book, 
The  Triumph  of  the  Egg,  with  a  variety  of  brief 
themes  and  has  excelled  even  Wmesburg  in  both 
poetry  and  truth.  At  least  it  is  certain  that  he  keeps 
on  advancing  in  his  art.  Although  life  has  not  hard- 
ened for  him,  and  he  sees  it  still  flowing  or  whirling, 
he  steadily  sharpens  his  outlines  and  perfects  the  fierce 
intensity  of  his  style.  Will  his  wisdom  ever  catch  up 
with  his  passion  and  his  observation?  In  each  succes- 
sive book  he  has  revealed  himself  as  still  hot  with  the 
fever  of  his  day's  experiences.  He  has  yet  to  show 
that  he  can  go  through  the  confusion  of  new  spiritual 
adventures  and  then  set  them  down,  remembering,  in 
tranquillity. 

E.  W.  Howe 

With  The  Anthology  of  Another  Town  E.  W.  Howe, 
obviously  on  the  suggestion  of  Spoon  River,  returned 
to  the  caustic  analysis  of  American  village  life  which 
he  may  be  said  to  have  inaugurated  in  The  Story  of  a 
Country  Town  almost  forty  years  before.  Then  he 
had  been  young  enough  to  feel  it  necessary  to  invent 
romantic  embroideries  for  his  grim  tale,  somewhat 
as  Emily  Bronte  under  somewhat  similar  circumstances 


158  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

has  done  for  Wuthermg  Heights — the  novel  which  Mr. 
Howe's  story  most  resembles.  But  all  his  inventions 
were  stern,  full  of  a  powerful  dissatisfaction,  merciless 
toward  the  idyllic  versions  of  country  life  which  sweet- 
ened the  decade  of  the  eighties.  Even  among  the 
pioneers  whom  Mr.  Masters  idealizes  there  were,  ac- 
cording to  the  older  man,  slackness  and  shabbiness, 
and  at  the  first  opportunity  to  take  their  ease  in  the 
new  world  they  had  won  from  nature  they  sank  down, 
too  nerveless  for  passion  or  violence,  into  the  easy  vices : 
idleness,  whining,  gossip,  drunkenness,  sodden  inutility. 
Against  such  qualities  Mr.  Howe  has  from  the  first 
proceeded  with  the  doctrines  of  another  Franklin,  but 
of  a  Franklin  without  whimsical  persuasions  or  elegant 
graces.  Having  apparently  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  he  was  a  failure  as  a  novelist  because  he  made  no 
great  stir  with  his  experiments  in  that  trade,  he  con- 
fined himself  to  more  or  less  orthodox  journalism  for  a 
generation,  and  then,  retiring,  founded  his  organ 
of  "indignation  and  information" — E.  W.  Howe's 
Monthly — and  began  to  pour  forth  the  stream  of 
aphoristic  honesty  which  makes  him  easily  first  among 
the  rural  sages. 

In  no  sense,  of  course,  does  he  assume  the  cosmopoli- 
tan and  international  attitude  which  most  of  the 
naturalists  assume:  "Provincialism,"  he  curtly  says, 
"is  the  best  thing  in  the  world."  Nor  is  he  in  any  of 
the  casual  senses  a  radical:  "In  everything  in  which 
man  is  interested,  the  world  knows  what  is  best  for 
him.  .  .  .  Millions  of  men  have  lived  millions  of  years, 


NEW  STYLE  159 

and  tried  everything."  Neither  has  he  any  patience 
with  speculation  for  its  own  sake:  "There  are  no 
mysteries.  Where  does  the  wind  come  from?  It 
doesn't  matter:  we  know  the  habits  of  wind  after  it 
arrives."  As  to  politics:  "The  people  are  always 
worsted  in  an  election."  As  to  altruism:  "The  long 
and  the  short  of  it  is,  whoever  catches  the  fool  first 
is  entitled  to  shear  him."  As  to  love:  "We  cannot 
permit  love  to  run  riot;  we  must  build  fences  around 
it,  as  we  do  around  pigs."  As  to  money:  "In  theory, 
it  is  not  respectable  to  be  rich.  In  fact,  poverty  is  a 
disgrace."  As  to  literature:  "Poets  are  prophets 
whose  prophesying  never  comes  true."  As  to  prudence : 
"Trying  to  live  a  spiritual  life  in  a  material  world  is 
the  greatest  folly  I  know  anything  about."  As  to 
persistent  hopefulness :  "Pessimism  is  always  nearer 
the  truth  than  optimism." 

When  the  author  of  such  aphorisms  undertook  to 
write  another  anthology  about  another  town  he  natu- 
rally avoided  the  mystical  elevation  of  Spoon  River  as 
well  as  its  verse;  he  used  the  irony  of  a  disillusioned 
man  and  the  directness  of  a  bullet.  His  scheme  was 
not  to  assemble  epitaphs  for  the  dead  of  the  village 
but  to  tell  crisp  anecdotes  of  the  living.  He  had  no 
iniquities  in  the  human  order  to  assail,  since  he  believes 
that  the  order  is  just  and  that  it  rarely  hurts  any  one 
who  does  not  deserve  to  be  hurt  by  reason  of  some 
avoidable  imbecility.  He  made  no  specialty  of  scan- 
dal ;  he  did  not  inquire  curiously  into  the  byways  of  sex ; 
he  let  pathology  alone.  He  appears  in  the  book  to  be 


160  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

• — as  he  is  in  the  flesh — a  wise  old  man  letting  his  mem- 
ory run  through  the  town  and  recalling  bits  of  decent, 
illuminating  gossip.  He  is  willing  to  tell  a  fantastic 
yarn  with  a  dry  face  or  to  tuck  a  tragedy  in  a  sen- 
tence ;  to  repeat  some  village  legend  in  his  own  low  tones 
or  to  puncture  some  village  bubble  with  a  cynical 
inquiry. 

Yet  for  all  his  acceptance  and  tolerance  of  the  vil- 
lage he  is  far  from  helping  to  continue  the  sentimental 
traditions  concerning  it.  The  common  sense  which  he 
considers  the  basis  of  all  philosophy — "If  it  isn't 
common  sense,  it  isn't  philosophy" — he  has  the  gift  of 
expounding  in  a  language  which  is  piercingly  indi- 
vidual. It  strips  his  village  of  trivial  local  color  and 
reduces  it  to  the  simplest  terms — making  it  out  a  more 
or  less  fortuitous  congregation  of  human  beings  of 
whom  some  work  and  some  play,  some  behave  them- 
selves and  some  do  not,  some  consequently  prosper  and 
some  fail,  some  are  happy  and  some  are  miserable.  His 
village  is  not  dainty,  like  a  poem,  for  the  reason  that 
he  believes  no  village  ever  was ;  at  least  he  has  never 
seen  one  like  that.  Downrightness  like  his  is  death  to 
mere  pretty  notions  about  tribes  and  towns  quite  as 
truly  as  are  the  positive  indictments  brought  against 
them  by  Mr.  Masters  and  Mr.  Anderson.  If  Mr.  Howe 
is  less  vivid  than  those  two,  because  he  distrusts  pas- 
sion and  poetry,  he  is  also  quieter  and  surer.  "I  am 
not  an  Agnostic;  I  know.  ...  I  have  lived  a  long 
time,  and  my  real  problems  have  always  been  simple." 


NEW  STYLE  161 

Smclair  Lewis 

Spoon  River  Anthology  was  a  collection  of  poems, 
Winesburg,  Ohio  was  a  collection  of  short  stories,  The 
Anthology  of  Another  Town  was  a  collection  of  anec- 
dotes. It  remained  for  a  novel  in  the  customary  form, 
Sinclair  Lewis's  Mam  Street,  to  bring  to  hundreds  of 
thousands  the  protest  against  the  village  which  these 
books  brought  to  thousands. 

Mr.  Lewis,  like  Mr.  Masters,  clearly  has  revenges  to 
take  upon  the  narrow  community  in  which  he  grew  up, 
nourished,  no  doubt,  on  the  complacency  native  to  such 
neighborhoods  and  yet  increasingly  resentful.  Less 
poetical  than  his  predecessor,  the  younger  novelist 
went  further  in  both  his  specifications  and  his  generali- 
zations. Instead  of  brooding  closely,  ironically,  pro- 
foundly, under  the  black  wings  of  the  thought  of  death, 
Mr.  Lewis  satisfies  himself  with  a  slashing  portrait  of 
Gopher  Prairie  done  to  the  life  with  the  fingers  of 
ridicule.  He  has  photographic  gifts  of  accuracy;  he 
has  all  the  arts  of  mimicry;  he  has  a  tireless  gusto  in 
his  pursuit  of  the  tedious  commonplace.  Each  item  of 
his  evidence  is  convincing,  and  the  accumulation  is 
irresistible.  No  other  American  small  town  has  been 
drawn  with  such  exactness  of  detail  in  any  other 
American  novel.  Various  elements  of  scandal  crop  out 
here  and  there,  but  the  principal  accusation  which 
Mr.  Lewis  brings  against  his  village — and  indeed 
tigainst  all  villages — is  that  of  being  dull.  "It  is  con- 
tentment .  .  .  the  contentment  of  the  quiet  dead,  who 


162  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

are  scornful  of  the  living  for  their  restless  walking. 
It  is  negation  canonized  as  the  one  positive  virtue.  It 
is  the  prohibition  of  happiness.  It  is  slavery  self- 
sought  and  self-defended.  It  is  dulness  made  God." 

Not  dulness  itself  so  much  as  dulness  militant  and 
prospering  arouses  this  satirist.  The  whole  world,  he 
believes,  is  being  leveled  by  the  march  of  machines  into 
one  monotonous  uniformity,  before  which  all  the  indi- 
vidual colors  and  graces  and  prides  and  habits  flee — 
or  would  flee  if  there  were  any  asylum  still  uninvaded. 
Thus  Mr.  Lewis's  voice  continues  the  opposition  which 
Wordsworth  raised  to  the  coming  of  a  railroad  into  his 
paradise  among  the  Lakes  and  which  Ruskin  and 
Matthew  Arnold  and  William  Morris  raised  to  the 
standardization  of  life  which  went  on  during  their 
century.  The  American  voice,  however,  speaks  of 
American  conditions.  The  villages  of  the  Middle  West, 
it  asseverates,  have  been  conquered  and  converted  by 
the  legions  of  mediocrity,  and  now,  grown  rich  and 
vain,  are  setting  out  to  carry  the  dingy  banner,  led 
by  the  booster's  calliope  and  the  evangelist's  bass  drum, 
farther  than  it  has  ever  gone  before — to  make  pro- 
vincialism imperialistic;  so  that  all  the  native  and  in- 
stinctive virtues,  freedoms,  powers  must  rally  in  their 
own  defense. 

Mr.  Lewis  hates  such  dulness — the  village  virus — 
as  the  saints  hate  sin.  Indeed  it  is  with  a  sort  of  new 
Puritanism  that  he  and  his  contemporaries  wage 
against  the  dull  a  war  something  like  that  which  certain 
of  their  elders  once  waged  against  the  bad.  Only  a 


NEW  STYLE  163 

satiric  anger  helped  out  by  the  sense  of  being  on  cru- 
sade could  have  sustained  the  author  of  Mam  Street 
through  the  laborious  compilation  of  those  brilliant 
details  which  illustrate  the  complacency  of  Gopher 
Prairie  and  which  seem  less  brilliant  than  laborious  to 
bystanders  not  particularly  concerned  in  his  crusade. 
The  question,  of  course,  arises  whether  the  ancient  war 
upon  stupidity  is  a  better  literary  cause  to  fight  in 
than  the  equally  ancient  war  upon  sin.  Both  narrow 
themselves  to  doctrinal  contentions,  apparently  forget- 
ting for  the  moment  that  either  being  virtuous  or  being 
intelligent  is  but  a  half — or  thereabouts — of  existence, 
and  that  the  two  qualities  are  hopelessly  intertwined. 
There  are  thoughtful  novelists  who,  as  they  do  not 
condemn  lapses  of  virtue  too  harshly,  so  also  do  not 
too  harshly  condemn  deficiencies  of  intelligence,  feel- 
ing that  the  common  humanity  of  men  and  women  is 
enough  to  make  them  fit  for  fiction.  Mr.  Lewis  must 
be  thought  of  as  sitting  in  the  seat  of  the  scornful,  with 
the  satirists  rather  than  with  the  poets,  must  be  seen 
to  recall  the  earlier,  vexed,  sardonic  Spoon  River 
rather  than  the  later,  calmer,  loftier. 

Satire  and  moralism,  however,  have  large  rights  in 
the  domain  of  literature.  Had  Mr.  Lewis  lacked  re- 
markable gifts  he  could  never  have  written  a  book 
which  got  its  vast  popularity  by  assailing  the  popu- 
lace. The  reception  of  Main  Street  is  a  memorable 
episode  in  literary  history.  Thousands  doubtless  read 
it  merely  to  quarrel  with  it ;  other  thousands  to  find  out 
what  all  the  world  was  talking  about ;  still  other  thou- 


164  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

sands  to  rejoice  in  a  satire  which  they  thought  to  be 
at  the  expense  of  stupid  people  never  once  identified 
with  themselves ;  but  that  thousands  and  hundreds  of 
thousands  read  it  is  proof  enough  that  complacency 
was  not  absolutely  victorious  and  that  the  war  was  on. 

Zona  Gale 

Before  Main  Street  Sinclair  Lewis,  though  the 
author  of  such  promising  novels  as  Our  Mr.  Wrenn 
and  The  Job,  had  been  forced  by  the  neglect  of  his 
more  serious  work  to  earn  a  living  with  the  smarter 
set  among  American  novelists,  writing  bright,  collo- 
quial, amusing  chatter  for  popular  magazines.  If  it 
seems  a  notable  achievement  for  a  temper  like  Mr. 
Masters's  to  have  helped  pave  the  way  to  popularity 
for  Mr.  Lewis,  it  seems  yet  more  notable  to  have  per- 
formed a  similar  service  for  Zona.  Gale,  who  for  some- 
thing like  a  decade  before  Spoon  River  Anthology  had 
had  a  comfortable  standing  among  the  sweeter  set. 
She  was  the  inventor  of  Friendship  Village,  one  of  the 
sweetest  of  all  the  villages  from  Miss  Mitford  and  Mrs. 
Gaskell  down.  Friendship  lay  ostensibly  in  the  Middle 
West,  but  it  actually  stood — if  one  may  be  pardoned 
an  appropriate  metaphor— upon  the  confectionery 
shelf  of  the  fiction  shop,  preserved  in  a  thick  syrup  and 
set  up  where  a  tender  light  could  strike  across  it  at  all 
hours.  In  story  after  story  Miss  Gale  varied  the  same 
device:  that  of  showing  how  childlike  children  are,  how 
sisterly  are  sisters,  how  brotherly  are  brothers,  how 


NEW  STYLE  165 

motherly  are  mothers,  how  fatherly  are  fathers,  how 
grandmotherly  and  grandfatherly  are  grandmothers 
and  grandfathers,  and  how  loverly  are  all  true  lovers 
of  whatever  age,  sex,  color,  or  condition.  But  beneath 
the  human  kindness  which  had  permitted  Miss  Gale 
to  fall  into  this  technique  lay  the  sinews  of  a  very 
subtle  intelligence ;  and  she  needed  only  the  encourage- 
ment of  a  changing  public  taste  to  be  able  to  escape 
from  her  sugary  preoccupations.  Though  the  action 
of  Miss  Lulu  Bett  takes  place  in  a  different  village, 
called  Warbleton,  it  might  as  well  have  been  in  Friend- 
ship— in  Friendship  seen  during  a  mood  when  its 
creator  had  grown  weary  of  the  eternal  saccharine. 
Now  and  then,  she  realized,  some  spirit  even  in  Friend- 
ship must  come  to  hate  all  those  idyllic  posturings ; 
now  and  then  in  some  narrow  bosom  there  must  flash 
up  the  fires  of  youth  and  revolution.  It  is  so  with 
Lulu  Bett,  dim  drudge  in  the  house  of  her  silly  sister 
and  of  her  sister's  pompous  husband:  a  breath  of  life 
catches  at  her  and  she  follows  it  on  a  pitiful  adventure 
which  is  all  she  has  enough  vitality  to  achieve  but 
which  is  nevertheless  real  and  vivid  in  a  waste  of 
dulness. 

Here  was  an  occasion  to  arraign  Warbleton  as  Mr. 
Lewis  was  then  arraigning  Gopher  Prairie ;  Miss  Gale, 
instead  of  heaping  up  a  multitude  of  indictments,  cate- 
gorized and  docketed,  followed  the  path  of  indirection 
which — by  a  paradoxical  axiom  of  art — is  a  shorter 
cut  than  the  highway  of  exposition  or  anathema.  Her 
story  is  as  spare  as  the  virgin  frame  of  Lulu  Bett; 


166  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

her  style  is  staccato  in  its  lucid  brevity,  like  Lulu's 
infrequent  speeches ;  her  eloquence  is  not  that  of  a  tor- 
rent of  words  and  images  but  that  of  comic  or  ironic 
or  tragic  meaning  packed  in  a  syllable,  a  gesture,  a 
dumb  silence.  Miss  Gale  riddles  the  tedious  affecta- 
tions of  the  Deacon  household  almost  without  a  word 
of  comment;  none  the  less  she  exhibits  them  under  a 
withering  light.  The  daughter,  she  says,  "was  as 
primitive  as  pollen" — and  biology  rushes  in  to  explain 
Di's  blind  philanderings.  "In  the  conversations  of 
Dwight  and  Ina,"  it  is  said  of  the  husband  and  wife, 
"you  saw  the  historical  home  forming  in  clots  in  the 
fluid  wash  of  the  community" — and  anthropology  holds 
the  candle.  Grandma  Bett  is,  for  the  moment,  the  sym- 
bol of  decrepit  age,  as  Lulu  is  the  symbol  of  bullied 
spinsterhood.  Yet  in  the  midst  of  applications  so 
universal  the  American  village  is  not  forgotten,  little 
as  it  is  alluded  to.  If  the  Friendships  are  sweet  and 
dainty,  so  are  they — whether  called  Warbleton  or 
something  less  satiric — dull  and  petty,  and  they  fashion 
their  Deacons  no  less  than  their  Pelleases  and  Ettares. 
Thus  hinting,  Miss  Gale,  in  her  clear,  flutelike  way, 
joins  the  chorus  in  which  others  play  upon  noisier 
instruments. 

Floyd  Dell 

The  year  which  saw  the  appearance  of  Main  Street 
and  Miss  Lulu  Bett  saw  also  that  of  The  Age  of  Inno- 
cence, Edith  Wharton's  acid  delineation  of  the  village 
of  Manhattan  in  the  genteel  seventies,  given  over  to 


NEW  STYLE  167 

the  "innocence  that  seals  the  mind  against  imagination 
and  the  heart  against  experience" ;  saw  Mary  Borden's 
The  Romantic  Woman,  with  its  cosmopolitan  amuse- 
ment at  the  village  of  Iroquois,  otherwise  Chicago ;  and 
saw  Floyd  Dell's  Moon-Calf,  which,  standing  on  the 
other  side  of  controversy,  lacks  not  only  the  disposition 
to  sentimentalize  the  village  but  even  the  disposition  to 
ridicule  it. 

Mr.  DelPs  emancipation  is  the  fruit  of  a  revolution- 
ary detachment  from  village  standards  which  is  too 
complete  to  have  left  traces  of  any  such  rupture  as  is 
implied  in  almost  every  paragraph  of  Main  Street. 
Moon-Calf,  recounting  the  adventures  of  a  young  poet 
in  certain  river  counties  and  towns  and  villages  of 
Illinois,  touches  without  heat  upon  the  spiritual  and 
intellectual  limitations  of  those  neighborhoods.  It 
settles  no  old  scores.  It  relates  an  unconventional 
career  without  conventional  reproaches  and  also  with- 
out conventional  heroics.  Felix  Fay  dreams  and  blun- 
ders and  suffers  but  he  goes  on  growing  like  a  tree, 
pushing  his  head  up  through  one  level  of  development 
after  another  until  he  stands  above  the  minor  annoy- 
ances of  his  immaturity  and  looks  out  over  a  broader 
world.  He  has  a  soul  which  is  naturally  socialist  and 
yet  he  never  loses  himself  in  proclamations  or  statis- 
tics. He  can  be  fresh  and  hopeful  and  yet  learn  from 
the  remarkable  old  men  he  encounters.  He  lives  and 
loves  with  an  instinctive  freedom  and  yet  he  holds  him- 
self equally  secure  from  devastating  extravagances 
and  devastating  repressions.  Mr.  Dell  writes  as  if 


168  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

he  had  steadier  nerves  than  most  of  the  naturalists; 
as  if  he  regarded  their  war  upon  the  village  as  an 
ancient  brawl  which  may  now  be  assumed  to  have  been 
as  much  settled  as  it  ever  will  be.  At  least,  it  seems 
scarcely  worth  wrangling  over.  The  spirit  seeking  to 
release  itself  from  trivial  conditions  behaves  most  in- 
telligently when  it  discreetly  takes  them  into  account 
and  concerns  itself  with  them  only  enough  to  escape 
entanglements.  Mr.  Dell  leaves  it  to  the  moralists  and 
the  satirists  to  whip  offenders,  while  he  himself  goes 
on  to  construct  some  monument  of  beauty  upon  the 
ground  which  moralism  and  satire  are  laboring  to  clear. 
Moon-Calf  is  very  beautiful.  Felix  has  a  poetic 
gift  sufficient  to  warm  the  record  with  fine  verses  and 
delicate  susceptibilities  upon  which  his  adventures  leave 
exquisite  impressions.  Even  when  his  rebellion  is  at 
its  highest  pitch  he  wastes  little  energy  in  hating  and 
so  avoids  the  astringency  and  perturbation  of  a  state 
of  mind  which  is  always  perilous.  To  say  Felix  Fay 
is  more  or  less  to  mean  Floyd  Dell,  for  the  narrative 
is  obviously  autobiographic  at  many  points.  But  were 
it  entirely  invention  it  would  testify  none  the  less  to 
the  affection  with  which  this  novelist  feels  his  world 
and  the  lucidity  with  which  he  represents  it.  He  has  a 
genuine  zest  for  human  life,  enjoying  it,  even  when 
it  invites  mirth  or  anger,  because  of  the  form  and  color 
and  movement  which  he  perceives  everywhere  and  par- 
ticularly because  of  the  solid  texture  of  reality  of 
which  he  is  admirably  aware.  Hatred  closes  the  eyes 
to  a  multitude  of  charms.  If  Mr.  Dell  suffered  from 


NEW  STYLE  169 

it  he  could  never  have  enriched  his  fabric  as  he  has  with 
so  many  circumstances  chosen  with  an  unargumenta- 
tive  hand;  he  could  never  have  extracted  so  much 
drama  out  of  dusty  people.  Had  he  been  a  sentimen- 
talist he  might  have  fallen  into  the  soft  processes  of 
the  local  color  school  when  it  came  to  portraying  the 
various  communities  through  which  Felix  takes  his 
way.  Instead,  the  story  is  everywhere  stiffened  with 
intelligence.  Felix  has  no  adventures  more  exciting 
than  his  successive  discoveries  of  new  ideas.  Even  the 
women  he  loves  fit  into  the  pattern  of  his  career  as  a 
thinking  being,  and  he  emerges,  however  moved,  with 
a  surer  grasp  of  his  expanding  universe.  That  grasp 
would  lack  much  of  its  confidence  if  Mr.  Dell  employed 
a  style  less  masterly.  As  it  is,  he  writes  with  a  candid 
lucidity  which  everywhere  lets  in  the  light  and  with  a 
grace  which  rounds  off  the  edges  that  mark  the  pam- 
phlet but  not  the  work  of  art.  He  can  be  at  once 
downright  and  graceful,  at  once  sincere  and  imper- 
sonal, at  once  revolutionary  and  restrained,  at  once 
impassioned  and  reflective,  at  once  enamored  of  truth 
and  scrupulous  for  beauty. 

When  Felix  Fay  had  escaped  his  original  villages 
and  had  taken  to  the  wider  pursuit  of  freedom  in 
Chicago  there  was  another  chapter  of  his  career  to  be 
recorded;  and  that  Mr.  Dell  sets  down  in  The  Briary- 
Bush,  wherein  Felix  finds  that  the  trail  of  freedom 
ends,  for  him,  in  madness  and  loneliness.  From  the 
first,  though  this  moon-calf  has  steadily  blundered 
toward  detachment  from  the  common  order,  some 


170  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

aching  instinct  has  left  him  hungry  for  solid  ground  to 
stand  on.  The  conflict  troubles  him.  He  can  succeed 
in  his  immediate  occupations  but  he  cannot  understand 
his  powers  or  feel  confident  in  his  future.  His  world 
whirls  round  and  round,  menaces,  eludes,  threatens  to 
vanish  altogether.  Thrown  by  dim  forces  into  the 
arms  of  Rose-Ann,  who  seeks  freedom  no  less  rest- 
lessly than  he,  he  is  married,  and  the  two  begin  their 
passionate  experiment  at  a  union  which  shall  have  no 
bonds  but  their  common  determination  to  be  free. 
Charming  slaves  of  liberty !  Felix  is  at  heart  a  Puri- 
tan and  cannot  take  the  world  lightly,  as  it  comes. 
His  blunders  bruise  and  wound  him.  He  punishes  him- 
self for  all  his  vagaries.  Rose- Ann  is  not  a  Puritan, 
but  she  too  has  instincts  that  will  not  surrender,  any 
more  than  Felix's,  to  the  doctrines  which  they  both 
profess:  jealousy  sleeps  within  her,  and  potential 
motherhood.  She  and  Felix  come  to  feel  that  they 
have  shirked  life  by  their  deliberate  childlessness  and 
that  life  has  deserted  them.  Yet  separation  proves 
unendurable.  So  they  resume  marriage,  vowing  "not 
to  be  afraid  of  life  or  of  any  of  the  beautiful  things 
life  may  bring."  Among  these,  of  course,  are  to  be 
children  and  a  house. 

Is  this  merely  a  return  to  their  villages,  merely  do- 
mestic sentimentalism  in  a  lovely  guise?  Mr.  Dell  has 
gone  a  little  too  deep  to  incur  the  full  suspicion.  He 
has  got  very  near  to  the  biological  foundations  of  two 
lives,  where,  for  the  moment,  he  rests  his  case.  There 
is  more  to  come,  however,  in  this  spiritual  history, 


NEW  STYLE  171 

whether  Felix  Fay  knows  it  or  not.  Let  the  house  be 
built  and  the  children  be  born,  and  Felix  and  Rose- Ann, 
though  citizens  and  parents,  will  still  be  individuals  and 
will  still  have  to  find  out  whether  these  complicated 
threads  of  loyalty  last  better  than  the  simple  threads 
which  broke.  Felix,  in  discovering  the  lure  of  stabil- 
ity, has  not  necessarily  completed  the  circle  of  his  life. 
Freedom  may  allure  him  again. 

The  Briary-Bush,  less  varied  than  Moon-Calf,  is 
decidedly  profounder.  It  hovers  over  the  dark  waters 
of  the  unconscious  on  perhaps  the  surest  wings  an 
American  novel  has  ever  used.  Though  it  has  probed 
difficult  natures  and  knows  them  thoroughly  it  does  not 
flaunt  its  knowledge  but  brings  it  in  only  when  it  can 
throw  some  revealing  light  upon  the  outward  perplexi- 
ties of  the  lovers.  Thus  it  gives  depth  and  timbre  to 
the  story,  and  yet  allows  the  characters  to  seem  actual 
persons  actually  walking  the  world.  At  the  same  time, 
Mr.  Dell  does  not  possess  a  too  vivid  sense  of  exter- 
nality. In  both  his  novels  all  facts  come  through  the 
rnist  of  Felix's  habitual  confusion,  and  in  that  mist 
they  lose  dramatic  emphasis ;  muted,  they  are  not  able 
to  break  up  the  agreeable  monotone  in  which  the  narra- 
tive is  delivered.  But  underneath  these  surfaces,  seen 
so  poetically,  there  is  a  substantial  bulk  of  human  life, 
immemorial  folkways  powerfully  contending  with  the 
new  rebellion  of  reason. 


172  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

F.  Scott  Fitzgerald 

Domesday  Book,  Poor  White,  The  Anthology  of  An- 
other Town,  Main  Street,  Miss  Lidu  Bett,  The  Age 
of  Innocence,  The  Romantic  Woman,  and  Moon-Calf 
would  make  1920  remarkable  even  if  that  year  had  not 
brought  forth  other  novels  of  equal  rank;  if  it  had 
not  brought  forth  James  Branch  CabelFs  richly  sym- 
bolical romance  Figures  of  Earth  and  Upton  Sinclair's 
bitter  indictment  100%.  And  though  most  of  these 
seem  somber,  there  came  along  with  them  another  novel 
in  which  were  gaiety  and  high  spirits  and  the  fires  of 
youth. 

F.  Scott  Fitzgerald  in  This  Side  of  Paradise  also 
had  broken  with  the  village.  He  wrote  of  his  gilded 
boys  and  girls  as  if  average  decorum  existed  only  to 
be  shocked.  But  he  made  the  curious  discovery  that 
undergraduates  could  have  brains  and  still  be  interest- 
ing; that  they  need  not  give  their  lives  entirely  to 
games  and  adolescent  politics;  that  they  may  have 
heard  of  Oscar  Wilde  as  well  as  of  Rudyard  Kipling 
and  of  Rupert  Brooke  no  less  than  of  Alfred  Noyes. 
Mr.  Fitzgerald  had  indeed  his  element  of  scandal  to 
tantalize  the  majority,  who  debated  whether  or  not 
the  rising  generation  could  be  as  promiscuous  in  its 
behavior  as  he  made  out.  It  is  the  brains  in  the  book, 
however,  not  the  scandal,  which  finally  count.  His 
restless  generation  sparkles  with  inquiry  and  challenge. 
When  its  elders  have  let  the  world  fall  into  chaos,  why, 
youth  questions,  should  it  trust  their  counsels  any 


NEW  STYLE 

longer?  Mirth  and  wine  and  love  are  more  pleasant 
than  that  hollow  wisdom,  and  they  may  be  quite  as 
solid. 

This  Side  of  Paradise  comes  to  no  conclusion ;  it  ends 
in  weariness  and  smoke,  though  at  last  Amory  believes 
he  has  found  himself  in  the  midst  of  a  wilderness  of  un- 
certainties. Yet  how  vivid  a  document  the  book  is  upon 
a  whirling  time,  and  how  beguiling  an  entertainment! 
The  narrative  flares  up  now  into  delightful  verse  and 
now  into  glittering  comic  dialogue.  It  shifts  from 
passion  to  farce,  from  satire  to  lustrous  beauty,  from 
impudent  knowingness  to  pathetic  youthful  humility. 
It  is  both  alive  and  lively.  Few  things  more  significant- 
ly illustrate  the  moving  tide  of  which  the  revolt  from 
the  village  is  a  symptom  than  the  presence  of  such  un- 
rest as  this  among  these  bright  barbarians.  The  tradi- 
tions which  once  might  have  governed  them  no  longer 
hold.  They  break  the  patterns  one  by  one  and  follow 
their  wild  desires.  And  as  they  play  among  the  ruins 
of  the  old,  they  reason  randomly  about  the  new,  laugh- 
ing. 

Dorothy  Canfield 

If  Floyd  Dell  seems  in  The  Briary-Bush  to  hint  at 
the  human  necessity  to  turn  back  by  and  by  from  free- 
dom, Dorothy  Canfield  in  The  Brimming  Cup  pretty 
clearly  argues  for  that  necessity.  Doubtless  it  is  to 
go  too  far  to  claim,  as  certain  of  her  critics  do,  that 
she  had  made  a  counter-attack  upon  the  assailants  of 
the  village  and  the  established  order,  but  it  is  sure 


174  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

that  she  gave  comfort  to  many  spirits  disturbed  by  the 
radical  outbursts  of  1920.  Already  in  The  Squirrel 
Cage  and  The  Bent  Twig  she  had  shown  an  affectionate 
knowledge  of  the  ways  of  households  in  small  communi- 
ties; and  in  Hittsboro  People  she  had  added  another 
hardy,  kindly  neighborhood  to  the  American  array  of 
villages  in  fiction.  The  Brimming  Cup  sounded  a 
deeper  note  than  any  she  had  yet  struck.  Suppose,  the 
novel  says,  there  were  a  woman  who  had  been  trained  in 
the  wide  world  but  was  now  living  in  a  distant  village; 
suppose  she  had  heard  and  felt  the  tumult  of  the  age 
and  had  begun  to  question  the  reality  of  her  content- 
ment ;  suppose,  to  make  the  conflict  as  dramatic  as  pos- 
sible, she  should  find  herself  tempted  by  a  new  love  to 
give  up  the  settled  companionship  of  her  husband  and 
the  heavy  burden  of  her  children  to  seek  joy  in  a  thrill- 
ing passion. 

Here  Dorothy  Canfield  had  an  admirable  theme  and 
she  rose  to  it  with  power,  but  she  permitted  herself  so 
easy  a  solution  that  her  argument  stumbles  lamentably. 
The  lover  who  disrupts  the  warm  circle  of  Marise's 
life  is  after  all  only  a  selfish  bounder,  a  mere  villain; 
stirred  as  she  is  by  the  promises  he  holds  out  of  rapture 
and  of  luxury,  she  would  be  simply  foolish  not  to  com- 
prehend, as  in  the  end  she  does,  that  she  must  lose 
far  more  than  she  could  gain  by  the  exchange  she  con- 
templates. Surely  this  is  no  argument  in  favor  of 
loyalty  as  against  love:  it  is  only  a  defense  of  loyalty, 
which  does  not  need  it,  as  against  a  fleeting  instability ; 
and  so  it  is  hardly  half  as  significant  as  it  might  have 


NEW  STYLE  175 

been  had  the  conflict  been  squarely  met,  great  love 
contending  with  great  loyalty.  Yet  while  the  novel 
thus  falls  short  of  what  it  might  have  undertaken  it 
has  numerous  excellences.  It  is  eloquent  and  passion- 
ate and,  very  often,  wise.  Rarely  have  a  mother's  rela- 
tions with  her  children  been  so  subtly  represented; 
rarely  have  the  manners  of  a  New  England  township 
been  more  convincingly  portrayed.  The  setting  glows 
among  its  green  hills  and  valleys,  its  snow  and  flowers. 
There  are  minor  characters  that  stand  up  vividly  in 
the  memory,  like  persons  known  face  to  face.  The 
atmosphere  is  at  once  tense  with  desire  and  spacious 
with  understanding.  Though  the  materials  come  from 
an  old  tradition  they  have  been  heated  with  the  fires 
of  the  scrutinizing  mind  which  burn  beneath  the  newer 
novelists. 

1921 

That  memorable  year  of  fiction  which  saw  so  many 
superior  books  produced  saw  them  successful  beyond 
any  reasonable  expectation;  and  it  is  scarcely  to  be 
wondered  at  that  the  year  following — with  which 
this  chronicle  does  not  undertake  to  deal — should  have 
responded  to  such  encouragement.  If  Dorothy  Canfield 
challenged  the  tendency,  Booth  Tarkington  saw  it  and 
ventured  Alice  Adams.  Sherwood  Anderson  in  The 
Triumph  of  the  Egg  and  Floyd  Dell  in  The  Briary- 
BusTi  proceeded  to  other  triumphs.  Half  a  dozen 
competent  novelists  followed  naturalism  into  the  "ex- 
posure" of  small  towns  or  cramped  lives:  particularly 


176  CONTEMPORARY  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS 

C.  Kay  Scott  with  the  hard,  crisp  Blmd  Mice  and 
Charles  G.  Norris,  rival  of  his  brother  Frank  Norris 
in  veracity  if  not  in  fire,  with  Brass.  John  Dos 
Passes  in  Three  Soldiers,  the  most  controverted  novel 
of  the  year,  dealt  brilliantly  with  the  unheroic  aspects 
of  the  American  Expeditionary  Force.  Evelyn  Scott 
in  The  Narrow  House  and  Ben  Hecht  in  Erik  Dorn 
attempted,  as  Waldo  Frank  had  already  done  in  The 
Dark  Mother  and  as  some  others  now  did  less  notably, 
to  find  a  more  elastic,  a  more  impressionistic  technique, 
breaking  up  the  "gray  paragraph"  and  quickening  the 
tempo  of  their  narratives.  At  the  same  time  romance 
once  more  showed  its  perennial  face,  suggesting  that 
the  future  does  not  belong  to  naturalism  entirely. 
Donn  Byrne  in  Messer  Marco  Polo  played  in  a  bright 
Gaelic  way  with  the  story  of  Marco  Polo  and  his  quest 
for  Golden  Bells,  the  daughter  of  Kubla  Khan.  Robert 
Nathan  wrote,  in  Autumn,  an  all  but  perfect  native 
idyl,  grounded  well  enough  in  local  color,  as  suggestive 
of  the  soil  as  an  old  farmers'  almanac,  and  yet  touched 
with  the  universal  fingers  of  the  pastoral.  If  American 
fiction  cannot  long  escape  the  village,  at  least  here  is 
a  village  of  a  sort  hardly  thinkable  before  the  revolt 
began.  No  matter  what  a  flood  of  angry  truth  Spoon 
River  Anthology  let  in,  beauty  survives.  Many  waters 
cannot  quench  beauty.  What  truth  extinguishes  is  the 
weaker  flames. 


THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SANTA  CRUZ 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  DATE  stamped  below. 


10  u 

MAY  29 '83      * 

MAY  2 1  1983  REC'D 


lOOm-8,'65  (F6282s8)2373 


PS379.V3  1931 


II 


3  2106  00205  3889 


! 


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